Daily Supreme Court reporting that explains what the Court held, why it matters, and where each judgment sits in Indian law.
On a question Indian courts had never settled, and on which four foreign courts split two-two, the Court holds that a valid termination notice ends a bareboat charter on its own — and vacates the arrest of the M.V. Nereus Progress at Tuticorin.
Once an arbitral tribunal exists, interim protection belongs to it. The Supreme Court appoints a sole arbitrator in the Kinetic Green–Saera Electric dispute and clears both orders below out of his way.
Two railway witnesses admitted they never searched the dead man's pockets. The Supreme Court restores the Tribunal's award to his parents and directs the Railways to pay within thirty days.
A conviction cannot rest on half a witness. Seventeen years after the FIR, and after six years already served, the Supreme Court sets aside a rape conviction that two courts had built on evidence one of them had already rejected.
A ground raised for the first time in revision, on a precedent about how defence evidence is taken, sent a completed Section 138 trial back to the defence-evidence stage. The Supreme Court calls it the ingenuity of the lawyer.
A litigant arguing his own case was told his appeal did not lie, after a different judge had admitted it. The Supreme Court upheld the rejection, explained why that is not inconsistency, and gave him a month to start again.
Two courts held that only the Chief Security Officer could have appointed him, so a subordinate could not remove him. The Supreme Court went to the Battalion Order and found they had the appointing authority wrong.
The power to put a life sentence beyond the reach of remission belongs to the constitutional courts alone. A Sessions Court used it, the High Court did not notice, and the Supreme Court has substituted twenty-five years.
Rather than order a retrial, three judges sent the principal witness back for further cross-examination seven years on. The conviction survived it. The death sentence did not.
A CBI investigation found the case against the father was not maintainable. By then he had lost his child. The Supreme Court has quashed the FIR and written safeguards that go to every criminal court and every police station in India.
The Orissa High Court held a challenge to an award both time-barred and filed in the wrong court. It was filed forty-four days after the award, and the respondent's own senior counsel conceded the limitation finding was wrong.
Two judges who heard the challenge to the 2023 Election Commission appointments law for five days could not agree on whether five more are needed. Between them they wrote 66 pages, and the papers now go to the Chief Justice.
A Family Court and the Delhi High Court both gave sole custody to a father who earns Rs 17,000 a month and is facing prosecution. The Supreme Court has stayed both, expunged the High Court's remarks on the FIR, and let the mother take the children abroad.
The Himachal Pradesh High Court quashed a Rs 23 crore PMGSY award on a public interest petition and ordered a re-tender within a month. The Supreme Court has given the contractor three months to finish instead.
Upholding the vacation of an anti-suit injunction, the Court holds that foreign proceedings still at an inchoate stage should not be halted, and that London was the convenient forum.
Twenty-four years after the trap, the Court holds that recovery of marked notes proves nothing without proof of demand, and sets aside a conviction the accused did not live to contest.
Losing before a Division Bench on the same submissions did not stop a second petition, and the Court holds the missing original document is a matter for trial, not a ground to end the case.
An arbitral tribunal that awarded 12 per cent for the pre-reference period exceeded its jurisdiction, and the High Court was wrong to equate the contract clause with an earlier one.
A stepson's claim that he alone inherited in 1949 fails, the Court holding that failure to prove an oral partition leaves the statutory transformation of a widow's interest untouched.
