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 a batch of over 30 writ petitions and transfer petitions filed by NEET-UG 2024 candidates alleging that the medical entrance exam, conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA), had been compromised by a leak of question papers before the exam, along with other irregularities at centres in Hazaribagh, Patna, Sawai Madhopur and elsewhere. Petitioners sought a re-test for the roughly 24 lakh candidates, arguing the sanctity of the entire exam had been undermined.
The Supreme Court examined the chain of custody of question papers, the extent and location of the leak, and expert analysis of the results, and concluded that while a leak of the paper did occur (traced substantially to Hazaribagh and Patna), there was no evidence on record to show it was systemic or large-scale enough to have compromised the integrity of the exam for the entire candidate pool of ~24 lakh students; the Court therefore declined to order a re-test for everyone. It did direct that marks for one ambiguous physics question be revised to award credit only for the scientifically correct option (reversing NTA's earlier grace-marks approach), found no conflict of interest in IIT Madras analysing the data, and expressed serious concern over NTA's conduct and systemic lapses. It directed the government's expert committee on exam reforms to submit its report by 30 September 2024 and to address specific safeguards (secure question-paper logistics, CCTV and data-analytics protocols, and student mental-health support) while leaving individual candidates free to pursue any personal grievances before the jurisdictional High Courts.
Even a proven security breach in a national exam does not automatically mean the results for millions of unaffected candidates must be scrapped. Courts weigh the scale and impact of the wrongdoing against the disruption a full re-test would cause, while still holding the exam-conducting authority accountable and demanding systemic reform.
