Judicial material — Ratio and guidelines of courts in the following cases, minority, and majority judgements

A man is picked up by the police outside a Mumbai railway station at midnight. Nobody tells his family. Nobody writes down when he was taken. Two days later he is in hospital. Is there any rule about what the police must do first? Since 1997 there is, and it was made by six judges of the Supreme Court, not by Parliament. The six cases in this topic are the ones law students meet in every paper for the next five years. The skill the paper tests is not remembering the story but finding what the Court actually decided (the ratio) and who agreed with it.

In two minutes

A judgment has a binding part (ratio decidendi) and everything else (obiter dicta); where judges write separately, count who joined whom, then state the ratio, the guidelines and what later law did with the case.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Legal Language on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.