Important judgements from the Supreme Court’s first week back from summer break (2025)

Transcript:

Hello everyone. Today we’re doing a quick recap of the Supreme Court’s first week back from its partial break. The court is working in partial capacity for seven weeks since May, and the post vacation inbox overload is real. The court came back to more than 86,000 pending cases and got to work right away. It delivered more than 50 judgments in its first week, with many making headlines for having impacted scores of important stakeholders.

On Monday, the Supreme Court held that a company can now be considered as a victim under criminal laws. A two judge bench permitted Asian Paints to pursue criminal action after it suffered financial and reputational injury due to the sale of counterfeit products. The lawyer who represented Asian Paints explained that the judgment changes the game for FMCG, pharmaceutical, electronics and fashion companies who are suffering from “modern corporate harms” which involve intellectual property violations. The same day, the Supreme Court held that secret recordings of phone calls between spouses do not violate privacy and can be used as evidence in marital disputes. When one of the parties argued that this kind of an approach might encourage snooping between husband and wife, the bench wrote that snooping was an effect of an already broken relationship and lack of trust. The law had nothing to do with it.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court reversed its own judgment in a custody case. The court had previously endorsed a High Court decision which granted custody of a 12 year old child to the father because the mother wanted to move abroad. The High Court reasoned that the shift would disrupt the boy’s life, but after the judgment, the child showed great mental distress at the thought of having to leave his mother. The court saw this and allowed him to stay with her.

On Wednesday, the court commuted two death sentences in separate cases. In one, a man killed his wife, her sister and his own three children out of suspicion that the wife was being unfaithful. The other case involved the rape and murder of a 10 year old child. The Supreme Court took note that the Trial and High courts have only commented on the brutality of the crime to hand down death penalty and did not take into account the full extent of the mitigating factors. A three judge bench reiterated that death penalty could only be awarded in the “rarest of rare cases.”

On Thursday, the Court upheld the rights of inheritance of women belonging to scheduled tribe communities. The male heirs in the community had suggested that custom dictated that women had no claim to their maternal grandfather’s property. The bench found no proof of such a custom. More importantly, the Court said that even if such proof existed, it would have been considered unconstitutional. “Customs too, like the law, cannot remain stuck in time,” it said. In other news from last week, Justice Yashwant Varma Approached the court on Thursday against the three Judge Enquiry Committee report. The committee had found “strong inferential evidence” that the judge had control over unexplained amounts of cash found in his house. He submitted that the committee had glossed over key facts and that he was not heard properly during the inquiry. The petition comes just before the monsoon session of Parliament where the issue of his impeachment will be discussed. The other big news *last week was the RTI filed by India Today on the costs incurred in installing and later removing the glass partitions in the front facade of the Supreme Court.

Reportedly, former Chief Justice DY Chandrachud’s initiative to install tinted glass and air conditioning for the corridors cost nearly 2.6 crore of taxpayer money. His successor, CJI B.R. Gavai’s decision to remove the panel cost an additional 8.6 lakh. For us at the Supreme Court Observer, the end of a court vacation marked a huge personal milestone. We finished publishing all the issues of the Supreme Court Observer Law Reports or SCO.LR from the 1st of January to now. This means that you now have a resource of 130 most important judgments of the year so far, decluttered, summarized and made easy. On the SCO.LR pages you can find HTML versions of the judgment where you can link specific paragraphs in your research.

We’ll continue to make the Supreme Court’s work simple and accessible for the rest of the courts term. Meanwhile, stay tuned and check out our website.

Thank you for watching and I’ll see you soon.