High Court judgments and orders from across India, with the legal point made clear.
A division bench of Justice Navin Chawla and Justice Arun Bhardwaj found merit in the argument that the trial delay may violate Article 21, but left it to the NIA special court to weigh the delay, a key witness and new charges, giving accused no. 24 in a Kashmir terror conspiracy case liberty to seek bail afresh.
A division bench of Justice Anil Kshetarpal and Justice Bharat Parashar held that a Section 34 court cannot swap the arbitrator reading of the contract correspondence for its own, restored the award declaring the Hazrat Nizamuddin platform contract prematurely terminated, revived the Rs 2.40 lakh EMD refund, Rs 12.09 lakh for irrecoverable advances and Rs 2.
Justice Sachin Datta vacated the protection from arrest a postgraduate surgery student had held since August in a rape case, holding that joining the investigation does not earn anticipatory bail, that Section 69 BNS is only a residual provision where force is alleged, and that a missing handset and deleted Instagram chats call for custodial interrogation.
Justice Neena Bansal Krishna set aside a district judge finding that the LTU Lufttransport suit, presented two days before limitation expired, was non est because of vakalatnama, court-fee and duplicate-set objections, held that curable registry defects relate back to the original presentation, and decreed Rs 68,24,653.71 with 6 per cent interest from July 2
Justice Om Prakash Shukla dismissed a Section 34 challenge by a Sirsa dealer to a Rs 1.3 crore award, holding that the 2015 bar on unilateral appointments does not reach back to a retired judge named by the manufacturer under the contract, that no separate Section 21 notice was needed, and that dues from the letter-of-intent years were arbitrable.
A division bench of Justice Navin Chawla and Justice Arun Bhardwaj dismissed the NIA appeal against the May 2023 bail of Mateen Ahmed Bhat, accused no. 10 in a Jammu and Kashmir terror conspiracy case, holding that an appeal against grant of bail tests only whether the order was illegal, perverse or arbitrary, and that the special court had done the prima fa
Justice Aarti Sathe held that the NSE Appellate Arbitral Tribunal, which confirmed a 2019 award making the broker pay a client Rs 15,92,671 over trades placed on a software glitch, reproduced the submissions of both sides verbatim and answered none of eight live questions, a patent illegality under Section 34(2A) that a court cannot cure by supplying finding
Justice Suraj Govindaraj held that the State Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities had no power under Sections 61 and 62 of the 1995 Act to order the Mandya Urban Development Authority to hand a reserved site to a man who had only registered and never applied against a notification, while fixing the reservation for persons with disabilities at 2 per cen
Justice Amit Borkar appointed a retired judge as sole arbitrator over Nisus Finance claims of Rs 16.94 crore against the developers of the Treasure Palms project, holding that an arbitration clause covering any binding provision of a non-binding term sheet prima facie reaches the exclusivity undertaking and the connected Rs 1.62 crore advisory fee, while lea
Justice Pravin S. Patil dismissed petitions by both a Bhandara school management and its teacher against a 2012 School Tribunal order, holding that Pandurang Parate, appointed in 1996 on a clear vacancy to fill a Scheduled Tribe backlog at the insistence of the Education Officer, could not be removed under a non-statutory 1995 circular, while the denial of b
A division bench led by Chief Justice Vibhu Bakhru upheld the Tribunal decision to drop eight companies, including Infosys, Wipro and Tata Elxsi, from the transfer pricing benchmark for Logica Private Ltd for assessment year 2007-08, and backed a 15 per cent related-party filter, holding that size and brand change margins and that none of the Revenue questio
A division bench of Justice Mohit Kumar Shah and Justice Sourendra Pandey dismissed the Letters Patent Appeal of a Rohtas contractor, holding that a money claim filed about eight years after part payment in 2015 fails the three-year limitation yardstick the Supreme Court laid down in Bhailal Bhai, and that Article 226 cannot be used to defeat the law of limi
A Gwalior Bench of Justice G.S. Ahluwalia and Justice Anuradha Shukla confirmed the conviction of Chhatrapal Rawat for kidnapping, raping and strangling a nine-year-old girl at a village wedding in May 2022, on the evidence of an 11-year-old cousin who saw him carry the sleeping child away and DNA matches across the clothes of both, but held the case was not
Justice Harish Kumar dismissed a writ petition sent down by the Supreme Court in which laboratory assistants redesignated as demonstrators before 1991 sought teacher pay, holding that the 2017 Durga Prasad Singh direction protects their existing designation, status, rank and pay but cannot confer the status of teacher or benefits that conflict with the 2012
A division bench of Justice Vivek Rusia and Justice Pradeep Mittal allowed five State appeals and set aside single-judge orders that had quashed recoveries of up to Rs 15.8 lakh from ministerial staff of the Madhya Pradesh Police, holding that employees who kept an erroneous ad hoc increase under court stays from 2006 to 2018 cannot invoke Rafiq Masih, and t
The Aurangabad Bench held that Maharashtra, which sat on university proposals to sanction posts for over a decade while directing yearly temporary appointments, must treat the posts as deemed approved, regularise the teaching and non-teaching staff of the Ghansawangi and Hingoli Model Colleges, and pay arrears for three years before the petitions were filed.
A division bench of Chief Justice Harish Tandon and Justice Murahari Sri Raman allowed 15 writ appeals by SC and ST engineers, revenue inspectors, doctors and health workers, holding that the single judge who quashed the State clarification on own-merit promotion across 64 writ petitions had no occasion to consider the June 2019 report quantifying inadequate
A division bench of Justice Navin Chawla and Justice Ravinder Dudeja set aside the 2004 murder conviction of casual worker Shashi Kumar Nair, finding that the lone eyewitness account of a stabbing at a wedding function attended by up to 200 guests did not inspire confidence, that the extra-judicial confession and dying declaration rested on one unsupported w
Chief Justice A. Muhamed Mustaque held that the Union cannot seek certiorari against an award passed by its own Collector, but that a composite award combining the Section 23 valuation with Section 30 solatium forecloses the Section 36 revisional power and cannot be enforced. The Rs 150 per sq ft rate for 102 hectares in Lachen, Lachung and Chungthang must n
Nine years after a Dhanbad sessions court sentenced the brother of the husband and his wife to seven years, a division bench of Justice Sujit Narayan Prasad and Justice Pradeep Kumar Srivastava found that every witness put the kerosene and the matchstick in the hands of the mother-in-law and the husband alone, that no dowry demand or cruelty was specifically
A division bench found the last-seen witnesses unreliable, the ransom-call recording unproved, the recovery of the body tainted by a stock panch and the fathers prior disclosure of the spot, and the SIM evidence bare of call records or a Section 65B certificate, and acquitted Manishprasad Gaud of murder, kidnapping and destroying evidence.
Justice Amitendra Kishore Prasad quashed the 2018 dismissal of Y.K. Soloman, who had asked from Central Jail Ambikapur that his departmental enquiry wait until his murder trial ended and was instead recorded as having no defence, but held that his later acquittal on benefit of doubt gave him no automatic right to his job and left the CRPF free to start a fre
Justice Madhu Jain dismissed Rajkumar appeal against his conviction under Sections 7 and 13(1)(d) of the Prevention of Corruption Act for taking Rs 500 from a provident fund claimant in a January 2003 CBI trap, holding that demand and conscious acceptance were proved by the complainant, the shadow witness, the recovery and pink hand washes, and that an objec
Justice Samit Gopal suspended the sentences of Mohd Azam Khan and Mohd Abdullah Azam Khan, who have spent over four years and three and a half years in custody in a fixed-term case, but held that their criminal antecedents left no justifiable reason to stay the convictions that keep them out of the coming Assembly election, and admitted the revisions for fin
