How Word 'Advertising' Stripped Google Of Safe Harbour

In early 2026, Justice Mini Pushkarna of the Delhi High Court decided Hindware Ltd. v. Google LLC & Ors. CS(COMM) 591/2017, decided May 22, 2026. The court permanently restrained Google from using the Hindware trademark as a keyword and awarded 30 lakhs in nominal damages. For over a decade, online advertising platforms structured their legal defence around a simple axiom. If an algorithmic process is hidden from the consumer's eye, it cannot legally constitute a trademark...

Yes, A Celebrity Must Be Protected, But To What Extent?

What defines a celebrity? -Talent? Lineage? The understanding of a celebrity today is quite different from what it was in the past. Cultural studies scholars unanimously agree that the metric for attaining this status in the present day is “well-knownness”. David Tan further identifies three aspects in attaining the standard of “well-knownness”: the celebrity individual, cultural producers, and the audience, which he collectively recognises as the “celebrity trinity”.According to him, these...

India's AI Governance Crisis Isn't A Lack Of Law

India does not have an AI governance gap. It has an AI governance fragmentation problem and the two are not the same thing.Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw's recent suggestion that India may need a dedicated AI law has framed the question as a binary: statute or administrative adaptation, EU-style legislation or sectoral flexibility. Both sides are answering the wrong question. The more consequential question is whether the three distinct AI governance regimes India has already built...

Why India's Anti-Defection Law Is Fractured

The June 2026 rupture in India's Trinamool Congress have left many questioning the efficacy of India's anti-defection law. Contained in the Tenth Schedule to the Indian Constitution, it was enacted with the aim to tackle the problem of perennial political defections within India. The law, however, was passed in haste, rushed through two Houses and lacked any national consensus. It left some major vacuums which allowed the judiciary to tweak the law to suit varying societal temperaments....

Beyond Ventilator: Harish Rana And Passive Euthanasia

On March 11, 2026, the Supreme Court of India delivered its judgement in Harish Rana v. Union of India[1] which reversed a Delhi High Court order. The earlier decision denied a family's petition to withdraw a Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy (PEG) feeding tube from their son, Harish Rana, who had been in an irreversible Permanent Vegetative State (PVS) for over thirteen years. The significance of this judgement lies in the doctrinal clarification it provides: for the first time, the Court...

Fragmentation Problem: Why Environmental Governance Needs Judicial Integration

In Re: Illegal Sand Mining in the National Chambal Sanctuary and Threat to Endangered Aquatic Wildlife (2026 LiveLaw (SC) 386)In its judgment of May 26, 2026, a Supreme Court bench comprising Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta addressed illegal sand mining in the National Chambal Gharial Sanctuary. The case, filed as Suo Moto Writ Petition (Civil) No. 2 of 2026, began with a straightforward crisis: rampant mining was destroying a notified wildlife sanctuary. The judgment's significance,...

When Does Electoral Supervision Become Electoral Lawmaking? Shrinking Space Of Article 327

The Supreme Court's decision upholding the Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision (SIR) has generated predictable debate. Critics have focused on disenfranchisement. Supporters have pointed to electoral integrity and the need for accurate rolls.The controversy is usually presented as a disagreement about the electoral rolls. At its core, however, it is a disagreement about power. The Constitution divides responsibility for elections between Parliament, which legislates, and the...

Defective Appeals, Extinguished Rights: Supreme Court's New Limitation Doctrine Under IBC

In a significant reaffirmation of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code's commitment to expedition and finality, a Bench of the Supreme Court comprising Justice Dipankar Datta and Justice Satish Chandra Sharma, speaking through Justice Dipankar Datta, held in CA Ramchandra Dallaram Choudhary v. Adani Infrastructure and Developers Private Limited (2026 INSC 629) that a litigant cannot circumvent the strict limitation regime under Section 62 of the IBC by filing a defective appeal and curing defects...

From Cage To Choice: How Prajwala Dismantled India's Paternalistic Anti–Trafficking Model

The Supreme Court took 297 pages to say something Indian law has avoided for seventy years that a rescued woman is not the state's property. The judgment does not tinker at the edges of the ITPA. It rejects the statute's foundational assumption that rescue necessarily means confinement. For decades, India's response to rescued trafficking survivors was largely centered on institutional rehabilitation through protective homes. The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (ITPA), 1956 encoded this...

The Rise Of Techno-Legal Professionals In India's Digital Economy

India's digital economy is undergoing a radical change in the ways business functions, the government works, and how citizens use technology. From Artificial Intelligence, fintech applications to cybersecurity, technology has come to influence every field. As the change becomes more pronounced, there is also a drastic change taking place in the legal profession due to techno-legal disruptions.In the past, the practice of law in India was primarily concerned with litigation, contract law,...

Prajwala's Consent Is Sovereign Until Someone Doubts It

The Supreme Court correctly placed a sex worker's consent at the centre of rescue and rehabilitation decisions. But having declared that consent unverifiable by any outsider, it tasked outsiders with verifying it. The structure that results does not make her consent sovereign, it makes it the first entry on a form someone else completes.The praise for Prajwala v. Union of India [2026 INSC 609], decided on 29 May 2026, has settled on a single word: consent. A Bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and...

Quantity Determination Under NDPS Act: Mixture Theory, Procedural Safeguards, And Scientific Challenges

NDPS (Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances) Act, 1985, is one of the stricter laws of India. It has the strictest punishment where the sentence of an accused is determined on the quantity of the contraband recovered from the accused during investigation, and also has the strictest conditions for bail under sec 37 of the Act. Chapter IV of the Act deals with offenses and penalties. When looking at the section dealing with the sentences for the offense, one would notice that the sentence...