Supreme Court of India · 2023
- Issue
- Whether DNA testing should be ordered as a matter of course to resolve a paternity dispute arising in matrimonial litigation.
- Why OIM cares
- The judgment makes explicit something the statutory presumption already implies: "biological truth" and "the legal question before the court" are not automatically the same inquiry. That distinction shapes what a man doubting paternity can and cannot expect a court to do on request.
- What it did not hold
- That DNA testing can never be ordered, or that biological evidence is irrelevant to every paternity dispute. The Court left room for DNA testing where the facts justify it — it declined to treat it as an automatic default in every disputed case.
Supreme Court of India · 2022
- Issue
- Whether the MTP Rules governing who may terminate a pregnancy between 20 and 24 weeks could be read to exclude unmarried women, and more broadly, whose consent and autonomy govern the decision to terminate a pregnancy.
- Why OIM cares
- This is the clearest judicial statement of why a husband's consent has no formal role under the MTP Act: the Court grounds the entire framework in the pregnant woman's own bodily and decisional autonomy under Article 21, regardless of marital status, rather than in any model where the decision belongs jointly to both spouses.
- What it did not hold
- That marital rape is a criminal offence. The Court explicitly declined to disturb the IPC's marital-rape exception, noting that a separate constitutional challenge to it was pending before another bench. It also did not create an unconditional right to abortion at any stage — the medical-board process, gestational limits and statutory grounds under the MTP Act continue to apply.
Supreme Court of India · 2018
- Issue
- Whether the Family Welfare Committee screening mechanism — created a year earlier in Rajesh Sharma v. State of U.P. to review matrimonial-cruelty complaints before arrest — was a valid judicial direction.
- Why OIM cares
- This is the Supreme Court revisiting its own prior guidance within about fourteen months, on the ground that the guidance went beyond what the Code of Criminal Procedure actually authorised. It is a concrete, on-the-record example of the judiciary applying to itself the same discipline OIM asks of its readers: when reasoning doesn't hold up, the position changes — it isn't defended out of momentum.
- What it did not hold
- That the underlying matrimonial-cruelty offence should be diluted, that complaints under it are generally false, or that arrested persons are automatically entitled to bail. The Court removed one specific, non-statutory screening layer — it did not reopen whether the offence itself should exist, and it left the Arnesh Kumar arrest checklist standing.
Supreme Court of India · 2014
- Issue
- Whether police may arrest automatically in a case arising from the matrimonial-cruelty framework (then IPC 498A), without first assessing whether arrest is necessary.
- Why OIM cares
- The safeguard exists because the process of arrest itself can impose serious consequences — on liberty, employment, and reputation — before a court has decided anything on the merits. This case is cited across the legal system, not only in gender-asymmetry debates, as a general check on arrest power.
- What it did not hold
- That complaints under the matrimonial-cruelty provision are inherently false, that arrest is forbidden outright, or that the underlying offence should not be taken seriously. The judgment is a procedural safeguard on how arrest power is exercised — it does not rule on the truth or falsity of any category of complaint.
Next case under reviewOIM does not fill a case slot with a weak example merely to make a grid look symmetrical.