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.
Krish Spinning, a cotton-spinning firm, held a fire insurance policy from SBI General Insurance. After a fire damaged its factory in 2018, the insurer's surveyor assessed the loss at roughly Rs 84 lakh (far less than the firm's initial claim of about Rs 1.76 crore). The firm signed a discharge voucher accepting this amount as "full and final settlement," but later argued the settlement had been coerced and invoked the arbitration clause in the policy to seek fuller compensation. Two coordinate Gujarat High Court benches accepted the firm's request and appointed a retired judge as arbitrator; the insurer challenged both High Court orders before the Supreme Court, arguing that once a full-and-final discharge voucher is signed, no arbitrable dispute survives.
The Supreme Court held that an arbitration clause, by the doctrine of "separability," survives independently even after the main contract is claimed to be discharged by "accord and satisfaction" (mutual settlement), so a dispute over whether such a settlement was genuine or coerced is itself an arbitrable question, not one that automatically defeats arbitration. It clarified that at the Section 11(6) stage, a referral court's scrutiny must be kept minimal and "prima facie". Courts should not conduct a detailed "mini-trial" weighing evidence about whether the discharge voucher was validly obtained, and should instead let the arbitral tribunal decide that issue itself, consistent with the Supreme Court's own recent seven-judge "Interplay" ruling favouring minimal judicial interference at the referral stage. Since the dispute here was genuinely about the quantum of the fire-loss claim (not about whether the arbitration agreement itself existed), the Court upheld the appointment of the arbitrator and allowed the arbitration to proceed, keeping all of the insurer's substantive objections open for the arbitrator to decide. The Court also used the occasion to clarify (without disturbing) its earlier ruling in Arif Azim on how limitation periods are assessed at the referral stage.
Signing a "full and final settlement" discharge form after an insurance claim does not automatically shut the door on arbitration if the arbitration clause exists in the underlying contract: a dispute about whether that settlement was fair or coerced can itself be sent to an arbitrator to decide, rather than being finally decided by a court at the outset.
