A judgment that stopped existing
In May 2025 the Supreme Court struck down the two instruments that allowed a project built without environmental clearance to be regularised afterwards. For anyone advising a community against a factory that had already gone up, it was the strongest authority available.
Six months later the court recalled that judgment on review, two judges to one, and it ceased to be law. The matter was reheard and decided again on 29 July 2026, with a mixed result: the 2017 Notification survives, the 2021 Office Memorandum is quashed prospectively, clearances already granted stand unless someone challenges them individually, and no fresh applications will be entertained.
Those eight months are the problem. Anyone who briefed a community, drafted an objection or planned a campaign on the May 2025 judgment during that period was relying on a document that had been withdrawn, and there was no mechanism by which they would have found out. Judgments do not notify the people who cite them. The PDF stays in the shared drive, the training deck still carries the slide, and the annexure to the proposal still lists the case.
The Vanashakti litigation.
It happens often enough to plan for
Pune Municipal Corporation, decided in 2014, was for six years the authority under which old land acquisitions were reopened and land returned to owners. In March 2020 a larger Bench in Indore Development Authority overruled it and narrowed the rule considerably. Advice written on the earlier case in 2019 and never revisited is wrong today, and nothing in the document itself indicates that.
Why it catches development organisations in particular
Some of it is the documents. Safeguarding policies, MoUs, community rights training material, the legal annexures of grant applications — these get written once, approved, and then reused for years. When they come up for renewal the conversation is about budgets and workplans, not about whether the case law behind them still holds.
Some of it is that nobody in the room is a lawyer. The colleague who added the citation three years ago has moved on. What remains is a case name and a one-line summary, neither of which carries any indication of age.
And some of it is that checking used to be difficult. The commercial legal databases charge for access, courts published inconsistently, and a search by party name would often return something confident and wrong. Look for the Thalappalam case, the leading authority on whether co-operative societies are public authorities under the Right to Information Act, and the first result is a different Kerala High Court matter.
The checking got much easier this year
The Supreme Court now publishes its judgments as open data. The signed PDFs sit in a public bucket, alongside an index giving each judgment's neutral citation, CNR number, decision date, presiding judge and disposal. You can read it without a key or an account. That index is what lets you confirm which document you are looking at, rather than trusting a search ranking.
India Open Law, published under the Apache licence by vaquill-AI, carries 12,848,644 judgments from the Supreme Court and 25 High Courts between 1950 and 2025, along with 813,168 tribunal matters across fifteen forums — the National Green Tribunal, NCLT, CAT, CESTAT, ITAT, DRT, SAT, CCI, APTEL, TDSAT, RERA, IBBI, the GST advance ruling authorities and ATFP — and 22,265 enactments. If you work on environment, land, labour or company matters, the tribunal collection is likely to be more useful than the Supreme Court one, since that is where most such disputes are heard.
District court decisions are published as well, through the eCourts services, court by court rather than in one aggregated set. We had this wrong on this site. The Docket previously said district-level decisions were not published, which is not true; that is corrected, and filed as issue #1023.
Two questions, not one
When people check a citation they usually check whether it is still good law. That is the right question but not the only one. The second is whether the court is still doing anything in the matter, because a judgment can be entirely intact while the case remains open and the same court issues fresh directions year after year. The right to food litigation runs that way, as do the migrant workers matter and the forest governance case.
The Docket records these as two separate fields, and both can be filtered.
The difference shows up in what you can ask for. Cite the 2023 manual scavenging judgment and you have the principle. The compliance order of January 2026 is where the ₹30 lakh figure for a sewer death is being claimed case by case, with a district survey still incomplete and the court still seized of the matter. A submission that stops at the judgment asks for less than the law currently provides.
What to check before citing
We are not lawyers and none of this is legal advice; it is the routine we ended up using.
Get the neutral citation. 2024 INSC 866 identifies a document, whereas a case name describes one, and descriptions collide — several unrelated matters share party names. A source that gives you a name and no citation has not yet told you which judgment it means.
Check whether the holding still stands: overruled, modified, partly overruled, referred to a larger Bench, recalled. Any of those may have happened since the document you are reading was written.
Check whether the court is still hearing the matter. If it is, the current obligations are in the most recent order rather than in the original judgment.
Write down the date you checked, next to the citation. That turns a claim about the law into a claim about the law as it stood on a particular day, which stays accurate.
What the Docket is for
The Development Law Docket holds 109 Indian judgments that changed what development organisations, state programmes and rights-holders can do. Each entry records both of the questions above as separate fields, so you can list only the matters a court is still running, or only the holdings that have been narrowed since they were decided. Case names and years were checked against the judgment text, and the six most recent link to the Supreme Court's own signed PDF, carrying the citation, CNR, date and judge as printed there.
It has clear limits. Matters still awaiting judgment do not appear in any judgments index, so the petitions on drug pricing, on wildlife protection and on social security for gig workers are live, consequential and invisible to this approach. High Court and tribunal matters need different handling, and the Docket is thin on both. And 109 judgments out of nearly thirteen million is a reading list rather than a database; where the two disagree, the linked judgment governs.
The purpose is narrow. The Docket will not tell you what the law is. It is meant to keep a judgment from sitting in your files looking current when it stopped being current a year ago.