Real judgements, distilled
Court judgements broken down into the case type, how the decision played out, and the lesson worth remembering, with the full judgement available as a PDF.
Transfer Petition (Criminal) · 2026 INSC 1060
Where a marriage has irretrievably broken down and the parties reach a genuine, voluntary settlement, including on alimony, the Supreme Court can use its Article 142 powers to grant a mutual-consent divorce and close out all related litigation in one stroke, without requiring the usual statutory waiting period.
Writ Petition (Civil) · 2026 INSC 1061
In long-running, complex litigation involving apportioned government liabilities across states, the Supreme Court can use a mechanism like a retired-judge committee plus periodic compliance affidavits to bring genuine finality, including firm timelines, transparency obligations, and interest for delayed payment, rather than leaving matters open-ended.
Civil Appeal · 2026 INSC 1062
In an "as is where is" liquidation auction, a bidder who voluntarily accepts the auction terms cannot later resile from a forfeiture clause by citing regulatory caps or after-the-fact excuses for non-payment: courts will enforce the auction notice's own conditions.
Writ Petition (Criminal) · 2026:DHC:8338-DB
Once someone is released from custody because the police failed to properly communicate the grounds of arrest, the police cannot simply re-arrest them by adding new charges: a specific, court-supervised procedure with senior-officer accountability must be followed, or the re-arrest itself becomes illegal.
Bail Application · 2026:DHC:8308
In economic-offence cases, bail can still be granted where the method used to quantify the alleged financial evasion is not adequately justified, and where the apprehension of re-offending is speculative rather than evidence-based.
Writ Petition (Criminal) · 2026:DHC:8323
A parole claim must be backed by a genuine, verifiable application to the competent jail authority: courts will scrutinise irregularities like an incomplete address, an unexplained thumb mark, or reliance on a mere friend's affidavit rather than close family.
Bail Application · 2026:DHC:8337
Courts can grant short, strictly time-bound interim bail purely on humanitarian/compassionate grounds (such as caring for a seriously ill family member), even while a case remains pending trial and an earlier bail plea has failed.
Bail Application · 2026:DHC:8312
Courts will not repeatedly re-examine a bail plea already rejected on merits unless the applicant can point to a genuine change in circumstances since the earlier order.
First Appeal from Order · 2026:DHC:8334
Under the no-fault compensation scheme for railway accidents, a valid ticket-holder injured while attempting to board a train, even carelessly, is generally entitled to compensation unless the railway can show a deliberate, conscious exposure to danger, not mere negligence.
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Legal Case Shots is a searchable database of Supreme Court of India judgments, each broken down into the case type, the court's key holding, and a practical lesson learnt, with the full judgment available as a PDF for citation or deeper reading.
In 1987, a social worker, Shashi Bala, applied to Punjab's Chief Minister for a residential plot under his "discretionary quota," and the Punjab government approved allotment of a plot in principle in 1987, subject to her submitting certain paperwork. The Improvement Trust never actually identified or handed her a specific plot, and years of correspondence went nowhere. She went to the Punjab & Haryana High Court, which, in 2006 and again in 2008, ordered the Trust to allot her a plot. Unknown to those courts, a Full Bench of the same High Court (later upheld by the Supreme Court in a different case, Harsh Dhingra) had already struck down the entire discretionary-quota scheme as unconstitutional, except for people who had already been allotted specific plots and built houses on them before mid-1996.
The Supreme Court held that because Shashi Bala was never actually allotted an identified, specific plot, only a general "approval" for allotment, she did not fall within the narrow group protected by the Full Bench's exceptions, and her claim was therefore wiped out by the declaration that the discretionary quota itself was invalid and violated the constitutional guarantee of equality (Article 14). Since this crucial Full Bench ruling was never brought to the notice of the judges who ordered her allotment, those orders could not stand once the omission was pointed out. The Court set aside both High Court orders in her favour and allowed the Trust's appeal.
A government's informal "in-principle approval" for a benefit like a land allotment does not create an enforceable legal right if the scheme under which it was granted is later found unconstitutional, and courts' decisions can be overturned when a controlling precedent was never brought to the judges' attention.
