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 appellants were the legal heirs of Dhaiya, a woman belonging to a Scheduled Tribe (Gond), who sought partition of ancestral property that had belonged to her father, one of whose six children she was (five sons, one daughter). Because the family belongs to a Scheduled Tribe, the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 does not apply to them by virtue of its own Section 2(2). The Trial Court and First Appellate Court dismissed the suit, holding that the plaintiffs had failed to prove any tribal custom giving daughters an equal share, and the High Court agreed, treating the absence of proof of an inclusive custom as fatal to the claim.
The Supreme Court held that the lower courts had wrongly assumed an exclusionary custom (that daughters get nothing) and placed the burden on the plaintiffs to disprove it: an assumption rooted in patriarchal Hindu-law thinking that had no place here, since neither side had actually proved any custom on inheritance one way or the other. Where no personal law or established custom governs a question, courts must fall back on the principle of "justice, equity and good conscience," preserved under Section 6 of the Central Provinces Laws Act, 1875 (a saving clause kept it alive even after the Act's 2018 repeal). Applying that principle alongside the constitutional guarantee of equality under Article 14 (and pointing to the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, which made daughters coparceners precisely to end this kind of gender discrimination) the Court held that in the absence of any proven custom excluding women, denying Dhaiya's heirs an equal share would itself be discriminatory. It set aside the lower courts' judgments and allowed the appeal, declaring the appellants entitled to an equal share.
Where a community's inheritance custom is genuinely unproven or silent, neither side can show what the custom actually says, courts should not default to denying women equal rights; they must apply justice, equity, good conscience and constitutional equality instead. This principle particularly protects Scheduled Tribe women, who fall outside the Hindu Succession Act's statutory protections.
