Medical Council of India v. State of Kerala
Background
Two private medical colleges in Kerala (Kannur Medical College and Karuna Medical College) had admitted around 180 students in 2016-17 in violation of Supreme Court-mandated NEET-based, online, centralised-counselling admission procedures. The Admission Supervisory Committee found these admissions illegal, a finding upheld by the Kerala High Court and the Supreme Court. To rescue the affected students, the Kerala government promulgated the Kerala Professional Colleges (Regularisation of Admission in Medical Colleges) Ordinance, 2017, to retroactively validate the illegal admissions, effectively overriding the binding judicial findings.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court held that the Kerala Ordinance was an unconstitutional legislative attempt to nullify final, binding judgments of the High Court and the Supreme Court, which had already conclusively held the admissions illegal. The Court reasoned that a legislature can change the basis of a law prospectively but cannot simply declare a judicial decision wrong and nullify it by purporting to validate what courts had struck down: that violates the separation of powers between the judiciary and the legislature. It rejected arguments that affected students deserved relief on NEET-merit grounds, holding that the matter stood finally adjudicated and could not be reopened, and that Article 142 could not be used to perpetuate an illegality already conclusively declared unlawful. The writ petitions were allowed and the Ordinance was declared ultra vires.
Lesson Learnt
A state legislature cannot use an ordinance or statute to directly overturn or nullify a specific binding court judgment, once a court has finally decided a dispute, the legislature's remedy (if any) is to change the law prospectively for future cases, not to retroactively erase a judicial finding of illegality.