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.
This was an eviction dispute over a rented room on Park Street, Kolkata. The landlord sued for eviction, arguing that the tenant's mother (the original tenant) had died in 2009, and under West Bengal's 1997 tenancy law, a tenant's heirs can only continue occupying the premises for five years after the original tenant's death, so the appellants should have vacated by 2014. Both the Single Judge and the Division Bench of the Calcutta High Court sided with the landlord, ordering the appellants to vacate within 60 days, based on an "admission" the tenant had allegedly made in an unrelated case.
The Supreme Court found that the eviction should never have been decided on the basis of an alleged "admission" without a full trial. On the merits, it held that the actual original tenant, Sh. S.K. Mitra, had died back in 1970, long before the 1997 Act came into force, and his tenancy was jointly inherited by his wife and the appellants at that time, under the older 1956 Act which allowed heritable tenancy without the five-year cutoff. The Court ruled that a new law cannot take away vested rights retrospectively unless the legislature says so in clear and unambiguous terms, which the 1997 Act did not do. It therefore held that the appellants' tenancy had not expired and set aside both the Single Judge's and Division Bench's eviction orders.
A law that changes tenants' inheritance rights generally applies only from the date it comes into force. It cannot be used to retroactively strip away rights that had already vested under an earlier law, unless the new law says so explicitly and clearly.
