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.
The appellant took a repeat (third) dose of the Hepatitis-B vaccine Engerix-B along with his wife and two sons in 1998, administered by his family physician. Only the appellant developed shoulder pain and, eventually, a permanent disability, which he attributed to "myositis" caused by an adverse reaction to the vaccine; his family members who took the same batch had no reaction at all. He filed a consumer complaint before the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission (NCDRC) seeking roughly Rs. 90 lakh in compensation from the manufacturer, which the NCDRC dismissed for lack of proof of any drug defect or negligence.
The Supreme Court upheld the NCDRC's dismissal, holding that the appellant had failed to discharge his initial burden of proving, even on a preponderance of probability, that he actually suffered myositis and that it was caused by the vaccine. The affidavits filed by his family doctor and his doctor-uncle were found to carry no real evidentiary value since they made bare assertions without any medical-record correlation, research, or expert basis, and the appellant had also failed to provide a muscle biopsy that the manufacturer had asked for to help establish causation. The Court also held that the vaccine manufacturer's failure to list myositis as an adverse reaction did not amount to "deficiency of service," since the reaction, per the manufacturer's global safety data, occurred in only about 0.02 per million doses: too rare and unproven in this specific case to establish negligence.
In consumer complaints alleging harm from a medicine or vaccine, the burden is on the complainant to establish, with real medical evidence (records, tests like a requested biopsy, or genuine expert opinion), both that the claimed injury occurred and that the product caused it: vague, unsupported doctor affidavits and the mere fact that symptoms followed treatment are not enough.
