Insights & Analysis
Considered commentary on the questions our clients actually face — drawn from the firm's courtroom practice across commercial, civil and property disputes.
Circular, Not Notification: Delhi High Court Upholds the 'Highest Demand' Rule for Choosing a Common Adjudicating Authority in Multi-State DGGI Notices
Eight petitioners caught up in an alleged three-layer fake-invoicing chain challenged the jurisdiction of the Delhi-based officer who adjudicated a composite show cause notice naming 146 noticees, arguing that only a notification, not a circular, could assign an adjudicating authority. The Delhi High Court dismissed the petitions, holding that the 'highest demand' circular does no more than allocate business among officers already vested with pan-India jurisdiction by notification, and relegated the petitioners to their statutory appeal.
Read the analysisSupreme Court: A Lessee Cannot Use Article 226 to Reopen a Title Dispute Its Landlord Already Lost
Deciding an appeal arising from a decades-old encroachment dispute over land in Hyderabad, the Supreme Court held that lessees claiming through a trust could not invoke Article 226 to protect their possession once the trust itself — after losing before the Division Bench and withdrawing its own Special Leave Petition with liberty only to file a fresh suit — was barred from doing so. The lessees' writ petitions, filed in their own names soon after the trust's remedy was confined to a civil suit, were themselves an attempt to keep the writ route open by other means.
12 min readVoidable, Not Void: Calcutta High Court Shields an Innocent DFIA Licence Transferee from a Decade-Old Customs Demand
Comet Overseas bought a genuine, validly transferable duty-free import licence for value, through proper banking channels, years before the original licence-holder's export obligation was found to rest on falsely declared goods. The Calcutta High Court held the licence remained voidable, not void, and that an unimpeached bona fide transferee cannot be made to answer in customs duty, interest and redemption fine for a fraud committed further up the chain.
13 min readAllahabad High Court: A Scheduled Tribe Land Sale Can Fail Because of the Buyer's Lost Tribal Status, Not Just the Seller's
Deciding nine connected writ petitions arising from land purchases made between 2012 and 2016 in Sonbhadra district, the Allahabad High Court has held that a statutory restriction on transferring Scheduled Tribe land to non-tribal buyers is not satisfied merely because the purchaser was born into the tribe and holds a caste certificate — she must also show she retained her tribal identity on the date of each purchase, and a prolonged, undisclosed change of religious and social identity can defeat that claim even years after the sale deeds were registered.
13 min readGujarat High Court: A Tribal Widow's Inherited Land Is Hers to Will Away, Absent a Proven Custom Barring Her
Deciding a second appeal over agricultural land in Surat district contested since 2002, the Gujarat High Court has held that a Scheduled Tribe widow who inherits property from her husband takes it as her own absolute, self-acquired property — free to bequeath it by will — unless a custom restricting female inheritance is actually pleaded and proved, not merely assumed.
13 min readJudicial Discipline Binds the Revenue Too: Delhi High Court Quashes a GST Demand That Defied a Binding CESTAT Refund Order
Welspring Universal was handed a Rs. 76,72,000 demand for a CENVAT refund the Customs, Excise and Service Tax Appellate Tribunal had already held it was entitled to keep, on limitation grounds the Tribunal had already rejected. The Delhi High Court quashed the demand, holding that a departmental adjudicating authority cannot treat a superior appellate order as though it does not exist merely because a parallel proceeding remains formally open.
14 min readA Right of Way Is Not a Right to Exclude: Bombay High Court on Gated Access Over Government Land
Forty-five years of maintaining a gate at the entrance to a government access road did not give a Mumbai housing society the right to keep it there. The Bombay High Court's order separates a permissive right of way from an allotment of land, and shows why a pending adverse possession suit over one plot does not shield unrelated encroachments on another.
13 min readSection 61 Is Not the Only Gateway: Allahabad High Court Sustains a Section 74A GST Notice Issued Without Prior Return Scrutiny
Eighteen sub-contractors, a works-contract chain running into crores, and a jurisdictional argument that Section 61 scrutiny must precede every GST demand. The Allahabad High Court draws the line between a Section 61-triggered notice and one built on independent verification, and holds the two are not interchangeable gateways.
13 min readGujarat High Court: Calling a Power of Attorney 'Irrevocable' Does Not Make It So
Deciding two second appeals arising from a thirty-year dispute over agricultural land near Gandhinagar, the Gujarat High Court has reaffirmed that an 'irrevocable' power of attorney is irrevocable only if it is coupled with an interest in the property under Section 202 of the Indian Contract Act — and that a sale deed executed by an agent after valid cancellation conveys no title at all, however registered it later becomes.
14 min read