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Vijay Pratap Yadav and Ors. vs. State of Uttar Pradesh and Ors.

Special Leave Petition (Civil) · 2022 INSC 227Decided 23 Feb 2022
Special Leave Petition (Civil) No. 11323 of 2021
Uday Umesh Lalit · Ajay Rastogi

Background

This dispute traces back to a teacher recruitment selection process in Uttar Pradesh, where a fresh selection was ordered after the Supreme Court's earlier ruling in State of U.P. v. Shiv Kumar Pathak directed the State to fill remaining vacancies through a new advertisement. A group of candidates who were unhappy with how an earlier 2012 notification's selection was handled, and who also raised a fee-refund issue, had already lost their Special Leave Petition, then lost an application for review, and then lost a second review petition as well, each time on the merits. Undeterred, an entirely new set of petitioners, who had not been parties to any of the earlier rounds, now sought permission to file yet another review petition on essentially the same controversy.

Decision Breakdown

The Court noted that the substance of this dispute had already been examined and rejected by the Court on three separate occasions. Since the petitioners seeking to file this fresh review were not parties to the earlier litigation and the underlying controversy had already been thoroughly considered, the Court saw no reason to grant permission to file the review petition, and closed the matter.

Lesson Learnt

Courts will not allow the same settled controversy to be relitigated indefinitely by different, newly-surfacing petitioners. Once an issue has been examined and rejected multiple times on its merits, repeated attempts to reopen it through review petitions will be turned away.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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