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.
Members of the Gupta family entered an oral family settlement in 2015, later reduced to a Memorandum of Understanding/Family Settlement Deed (MoU/FSD) in 2019, which was not signed by Rahul Gupta (son of one of the settlors). When a dispute arose between the signatories, a sole arbitrator was appointed under Section 11(6) of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, and Rahul Gupta's plea to intervene was rejected at that stage. Months after the arbitrator's appointment, Rahul Gupta and other non-signatory companies filed fresh applications in the already-disposed proceedings asking to be present during the arbitration and to access its records; a High Court judge allowed this and also recognised a 23% share for Rahul Gupta in the family properties.
The Supreme Court held that once a sole arbitrator is appointed under Section 11(6), the court becomes "functus officio" and has no further jurisdiction to entertain fresh applications in that disposed-of proceeding. Since an arbitral award binds only parties to the arbitration agreement (Section 35) and non-signatories are strangers to it, there was no legal basis to let a non-signatory remain present during the arbitration; doing so would also breach the confidentiality obligation under Section 42A. The Court therefore set aside the High Court's order permitting Rahul Gupta's presence and the accompanying directions, and allowed the appeals with costs of Rs. 3,00,000 payable to the Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association.
A person who has not signed an arbitration agreement has no right to attend or observe the arbitration proceedings between the actual parties, and once a court has appointed an arbitrator under Section 11(6), it loses jurisdiction to pass further directions in that same case: any new dispute must go through a fresh, properly framed proceeding.
