Rethinking Finality: The Supreme Court Of India's Review Jurisdiction In Practice, January 2024 – December 2025 - A Doctrinal Study Of Ten Review Petitions Decided By The Supreme Court Of India
Priya Singh, B.Sc., LL.B. (Hons.), National Law Institute University, Bhopal
ABSTRACT
Article 137 of the Constitution of India, read with Order XLVII Rule 1 of the Supreme Court Rules, 2013 and Order XLVII Rule 1 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, confers upon the Supreme Court a power of review that sits in tension with the equally fundamental principle of finality of judgments. This paper examines that tension empirically through a dataset of ten review petitions decided by the Supreme Court between January 2024 and December 2025, spanning service law, environmental regulation, child custody, medical education, contract and property law, taxation, constitutional adjudication, land law, succession, and armed forces service conditions. Of the ten petitions studied, eight resulted in the recall or modification of the original judgment, one was rejected, and one produced an internally inconsistent record in which a subsequent order appears to have granted a review that an earlier order had refused. The paper argues that while the formal test for review, an error apparent on the face of the record, remains narrow in articulation, the cases studied reveal a functionally broader practice in which misapplication of binding precedent, post- decisional facts, and jurisdictional overreach are all treated as sufficient to reopen a final judgment. The paper concludes with observations on what this practice suggests about the doctrine of finality in Indian constitutional adjudication.
Keywords: Review jurisdiction; Article 137; Order XLVII Rule 1 CPC; error apparent on the face of the record; finality of judgments; Supreme Court of India; curative jurisdiction.
