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.
S.A. Builders was awarded a 1983 contract by the municipal corporation to build flyover approaches, but the work was left incomplete in 1990 due to non-availability of the site, and the corporation stopped paying the contractor's bills. An arbitrator awarded the builder about Rs. 1.7 crore with 18% interest in 1997, but decades of litigation followed over exactly how interest should be calculated, including a dispute over whether an earlier Supreme Court precedent (S.L. Arora) or a later one that overruled it (Hyder Consulting) governed, and whether the arbitrator could still issue clarifications about the award after the fact. The Delhi High Court's Division Bench, with the parties' consent, sent the matter back to a Single Judge to work out only the final calculation, and the corporation then challenged even that order before the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court dismissed the corporation's appeal, holding that the arbitrator's clarification of the award was validly issued within the extended time period the parties themselves had agreed to under Section 33(1) of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, so the arbitrator had not become "functus officio" (lost authority) when he clarified it. The Court also confirmed that, absent a contractual interest clause, Sections 31(7)(a) and (b) of the 1996 Act govern: the "sum" awarded includes the principal plus pre-award interest, and this combined sum then carries 18% post-award interest until payment, consistent with the Court's earlier ruling in Hyder Consulting. Since the High Court's order had itself been a consent order limited to recalculating figures, the corporation could not use this appeal to reopen settled legal issues.
Once parties consent to a court order or a legal question has already been conclusively decided in earlier rounds of litigation, a party cannot repeatedly relitigate the same point in a later appeal, and in arbitration, post-award interest is calculated on the principal plus all interest accrued up to the award date, not on the principal alone.
