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.
Land Acquisition Appeal · 2026:DHC:8039
Deadlines for filing appeals matter, and courts are unlikely to excuse very long, poorly-explained delays. A litigant who accepts a particular valuation or benchmark at the trial stage, without presenting evidence to the contrary, will generally not be allowed to seek a better outcome later on appeal.
Civil Miscellaneous (Main) Petition · 2026:DHC:8010
Even a short delay in responding to a summary suit can nearly cost a person their right to defend themselves in court. Even so, courts will usually give a genuine, honestly-explained short delay the benefit of the doubt rather than shutting the door entirely, especially when doing so avoids a decree being passed without a hearing on the actual merits.
Criminal Appeal · 2026:DHC:7989-DB
A conviction cannot rest on the "last seen together" circumstance alone, however suspicious it looks. The prosecution must build a complete, gap-free chain of evidence that leaves no reasonable possibility of innocence, and any genuine doubt must benefit the accused, not the prosecution.
Writ Petition (Civil) · 2026:DHC:8044
An employer, including a government body, cannot dismiss even a daily-wage or temporary worker as punishment for alleged wrongdoing without first giving them a fair, formal inquiry with a real chance to defend themselves; skipping that step can make the termination illegal regardless of how the employer labels it.
Regular Second Appeal · 2026:DHC:8003
When a special law like the Electricity Act sets up its own dedicated authority to resolve a particular type of dispute (here, compensation for unauthorised power lines), ordinary civil courts generally cannot step in even if the other side's conduct was clearly improper. The aggrieved person must go to that specific authority (District Magistrate/Police Commissioner) instead, and must also be ready to prove the actual amount of loss suffered, not just assert a claim.
First Appeal from Order · 2026:DHC:8047
A long gap between a person's death and a Will being taken to court for probate is not automatically suspicious if there's a reasonable family explanation for it; and a party who repeatedly fails to use the opportunities a court gives them to produce evidence cannot expect a second chance for the same evidence at the appeal stage.
Criminal Miscellaneous Case · 2026:DHC:8035
Where a genuine compromise is reached in a case involving non-serious, personal-dispute offences, courts can quash the FIR to spare both sides a lengthy trial, but only after the judge is personally satisfied that the settlement is voluntary and genuine, not merely on paper.
Writ Petition (Civil) · 2026:DHC:7977-DB
Being investigated twice over GST credit from the same supplier is not automatically illegal. The "same subject matter" protection only kicks in when both proceedings target the exact same contravention, so a genuine fraud probe can run independently of an earlier routine tax assessment.
Regular First Appeal · 2026:DHC:8014
In Indian property law, being physically absent from a jointly-inherited property does not by itself strip a family co-owner of their rightful share. The other occupants must prove they treated the absent owner as clearly and knowingly excluded, not just that they lived there without them.
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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.
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This is a batch of appeals by rice millers in Bihar arising out of the 2011-12 Custom Milled Rice (CMR) procurement scheme, under which millers were to procure paddy from farmers and supply milled rice to the Bihar State Food and Civil Supplies Corporation for the Public Distribution System. Disputes arose over dues claimed from the millers, and the Corporation sought to recover these dues as a "public demand" under the Bihar and Orissa Public Demands Recovery Act, 1914 through certificate proceedings before a certificate officer. The millers challenged these recovery certificates by writ petition, arguing the amounts claimed did not qualify as a "public demand" under the Act and that the certificate officer had not properly determined this threshold ("jurisdictional fact") before proceeding.
The Supreme Court held that whether a claim qualifies as a "public demand" under Section 3(6) of the 1914 Act is itself a jurisdictional fact that the certificate officer must determine before proceeding to recover the amount, and that the definition of "public demand" is deliberately broad and not confined to specific illustrative categories. However, the Court found that the millers had approached the High Court by writ petition without first exhausting the statutory remedies available to them under the Act to contest the recovery certificates before the appropriate authority. The Court declined to examine the millers' procedural objections itself, dismissed the civil appeals, but granted the rice millers a fresh thirty-day window to pursue their statutory remedy under the Act, directing that such remedy be entertained without regard to delay or limitation.
Before rushing to a writ court to challenge a demand for recovery of dues, a person should first exhaust the specific statutory remedy the law provides for disputing that demand. Courts will generally decline to bypass such statutory mechanisms, though they may give a fresh opportunity to use them properly.
