Every ranking guide to this question is American. This one is written for Indian practice, where the treatment vocabulary is different and the flags do not exist.
A judgment is good law if it has not been overruled, reversed, or rendered per incuriam, and if a later and larger bench has not taken a different view. Checking means tracing how later courts have treated it — followed, distinguished, doubted, referred to a larger bench, or overruled — before you rely on it.
A later court can take one of five positions on an authority. Each position has a different consequence for the advocate relying on it. This is the whole of good-law checking, compressed.
| Treatment | What the later court did | What it means for your reliance | What you do next |
|---|---|---|---|
| Followed | Applied the earlier judgment to decide the matter before it. | The authority is intact and has been reaffirmed. The more recent, higher-court applications you can show, the stronger the ground. | Cite the later judgment alongside the earlier one. It shows the proposition is live, not archaeological. |
| Distinguished | Accepted the earlier judgment as correct but held it inapplicable on the facts or the statute in question. | Still good law, but the ground has narrowed. If your facts resemble the case in which it was distinguished, expect the same answer. | Read the distinguishing paragraph and check whether it captures your facts. Deal with it in the brief before the other side does. |
| Doubted or referred | Expressed doubt about the correctness of the earlier view, or referred the question to a larger bench. | The authority is unsettled. It has not fallen, but it is under question and a decision may be pending. | Check whether the reference has been answered. Cite it with the doubt disclosed, and have a second line of authority ready. |
| Held per incuriam | Held that the earlier decision was given in ignorance of a binding provision or a binding precedent. | Not binding, even though it was never formally overruled. It is one of the easiest authorities to have knocked out at the bar. | Do not lead with it. If it must be used, cite it with the qualification and argue why the finding does not touch your point. |
| Overruled | Held the earlier view wrong in law, expressly or by laying down a proposition that cannot stand with it. | No longer good law on the point overruled. Other parts of the same judgment may still stand. | Replace it. Cite the overruling judgment and check whether any part of the earlier judgment survives on a different point. |
One judgment can carry several of these at once. A 1998 Supreme Court judgment may be followed on issue one, distinguished on issue two, and overruled on issue three by a Constitution Bench two decades later. This is why "is this case still good law" is never a yes-or-no question about a case. It is a question about a proposition in a case, and it has to be asked at exactly that level. The ratio and obiter distinction is where most of that exactness comes from.
Overruling is a finding about the law. Distinguishing is a finding about the facts. They are different operations, and treating one as a weaker version of the other is how good authorities get abandoned and dead ones get filed.
Overruled. A bench competent to do so has held that the earlier view was wrong in law. The earlier judgment no longer states the law on that point, and it does not matter how carefully it was reasoned or how often it was followed before. Overruling need not use the word. Where a larger bench lays down a proposition that cannot stand together with an earlier judgment, the earlier judgment is overruled by necessary implication, and nothing in the text will say so. This is the treatment most easily missed by a search that looks only for the word.
Distinguished. A later court has accepted the earlier judgment as correct and held that it does not govern the case before it, because the facts or the statutory setting are materially different. The authority survives untouched. What has changed is the map of where it applies. An authority distinguished thirty times is still good law and is also, in practice, close to unusable outside its original facts — a fact that the phrase "still good law" completely conceals.
The practical test is simple. Ask what the later court said about the proposition. If it said the proposition is wrong, that is overruling. If it said the proposition is right but does not reach these facts, that is distinguishing. If it said the proposition may be wrong and someone larger should decide, that is a reference — and the honest answer to your client is that the point is open.
A third case sits between them and is worth naming: a judgment that has been explained. A later court restates what the earlier judgment meant, often narrowing it without saying it was wrong. Explanation is not overruling, but a proposition that has been explained twice is rarely still as wide as its headnote.
Five steps. None of them is difficult. All of them are long, and the fourth is the one that is skipped at eleven at night.
Open the full text and find the paragraph your proposition actually comes from. Confirm the court, the bench strength and the question the court framed for itself. A headnote is written by a reporter, it compresses, and compression drops the conditions attached to a holding. If the paragraph does not say what the headnote says, the paragraph wins.
Trace subsequent citations across the Supreme Court and the High Courts, in date order. A judgment can be undisturbed for twenty years and displaced in the twenty-first, and the displacing judgment is not always from the court you expect. This is the step that cannot be shortened by memory, because the judgment you have not read is the one that matters.
Open each later judgment at the paragraph where it deals with your authority. The treatment lives in that paragraph. A judgment listed as "referred to" may in fact contain a line disapproving the very proposition you need, and a judgment listed as "dissented from" may be dealing with an entirely different issue in the same case.
Establish whether the later court could displace the earlier one at all. A larger bench prevails over a smaller bench of the same court. A coordinate bench that disagrees must refer, not decide contrary. A High Court cannot overrule the Supreme Court, and a High Court judgment does not bind another High Court. Adverse treatment from a court that could not displace your authority is noise.
Check that the passage you rely on is part of the reasoning necessary to the decision, and that the point was argued rather than assumed. A proposition that passed sub silentio is not authority. This is the step that decides whether the authority survives the first question from the bench, and it is the step most often skipped.
Done properly for a single authority, this is thirty to sixty minutes. A brief with fifteen authorities is a day. That arithmetic is the whole reason good-law checking gets compressed into "I have used this case before", which is a statement about the past, not about today.
Shepardizing is an American term for checking the subsequent history of a case using a citator, and it has no Indian equivalent as a word. Indian advocates do the same work and call it nothing in particular — "checking whether it still holds", "seeing if it has been touched", or simply reading the later cases.
The concept transfers. The apparatus does not. American citators attach coloured flags to a case, and a red flag carries a settled meaning within that system. Indian practice has no such convention, for a reason worth understanding: our treatments are frequently partial. A Supreme Court judgment on four issues can be affirmed on three and overruled on one, and there is no single symbol that honestly represents that. A flag would have to lie.
What transfers cleanly is the discipline. Before an authority is cited, someone must have read what happened to it afterwards. Whether that is called Shepardizing, citator work, or a good-law check makes no difference to a bench that finds the authority has been overruled. The glossary entry on citators sets out the vocabulary, and the treatment table above is the Indian version of the flag system — written out in words, because words can carry the conditions that colours cannot.
Lawgger was built around this problem. The good-law status is not a feature bolted on to search; it is attached to every authority an answer relies on.
Every research answer is built only from judgments on file — Supreme Court and all 25 High Courts, 2.07 crore+ judgments in full text — and every proposition is pin-cited to the page. Beside each authority sits its good-law status, so you see whether it still holds before you decide to use it.
Paste your own draft, or the other side's, and Authority Check extracts every case cited and returns a Table of Authorities with a verdict against each. It is the fastest route to two answers: what in your brief needs replacing, and what in theirs will not survive being read.
Where a judgment has been treated by later courts, you can open those judgments at the paragraph that deals with it — 18 lakh citation links across the collection. That is step three of the manual method, without the evening it usually costs.
The connected work is research that answers in the terms of a matter, drawn from the same judgments; and, where the point turns on a statutory provision, 1.28 crore+ case-to-section links across 1,607 central and state Acts. Advocates comparing options usually arrive here from the Indian Kanoon comparison — free search finds the judgment; it does not tell you whether the judgment survived.
A good-law verdict tells you where to look and what to worry about. It does not read the judgment for you, and it does not know your facts. Three limits are worth stating plainly, because they are the ones that matter in a hearing.
Treatment is issue-specific. A judgment can be good law on the point you need and bad law on the point in the headnote. Any status shown against a whole judgment is a summary, and summaries lose conditions. Where the point is load-bearing, open the treatment paragraph.
Reporting takes time. A judgment delivered this morning is not yet a citation in anything. There is always a window between a decision and its appearance in the later-citation record, and in a fast-moving area that window can be the difference.
Applicability is not status. An authority that is unquestionably good law may still be the wrong authority for your matter — decided on a different provision, a different stage, or a different set of facts. No verdict can tell you that. Only reading can.
Lawgger is a software company. It is not a law firm, it does not give legal advice, and it does not act in any matter. It shows you original judgments of real cases and where each one stands. How accuracy, privacy and the audit trail are handled. On the neighbouring risk — tools that produce citations to judgments that were never delivered — see fabricated citations and how to stop them reaching a filing.
A judgment is good law when it has not been overruled, reversed or set aside, has not been held per incuriam, and no later or larger bench has taken a different view on the point relied on. Good law is a status, not a measure of quality. A well-reasoned judgment ceases to be good law the day a larger bench decides otherwise.
Trace every later judgment that cites the case, open each at the paragraph dealing with your authority, and read what the later court did with it. Then check whether that court had the authority to displace it, by bench strength and by hierarchy. Overruling can be express or by necessary implication, so the word "overruled" may never appear anywhere in the text.
An overruled judgment was held wrong in law by a bench competent to say so, and is no longer good law on that point. A distinguished judgment was accepted as correct but held inapplicable because the facts or the statutory setting differed. Overruling removes the authority. Distinguishing narrows the ground on which it can be used.
A decision is per incuriam when it was given in ignorance of a binding statutory provision or a binding precedent that would have changed the result. A judgment held per incuriam does not bind later courts even though it was never formally overruled. The finding is made by a later court, so an advocate argues it by citing the decision that so held. Glossary entry.
No. Article 141 of the Constitution makes the law declared by the Supreme Court binding on all courts within India. A High Court may distinguish a Supreme Court judgment on facts, or read it alongside a later Supreme Court decision, but it cannot overrule it. Only a larger bench of the Supreme Court can displace a Supreme Court judgment.
Paste the brief, or just the list of authorities, into Authority Check in Lawgger. It returns a Table of Authorities with a verdict against each case, showing whether it is still good law and how later courts have treated it. Reading the flagged authorities first is usually the shortest route to the weak point in the other side's case.
Doing it by hand is free and slow: find the later citations, read each treatment paragraph, check bench strength. Lawgger does it in one step, and every answer it returns carries a good-law verdict on the authorities cited. Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial of the full product and no card is required to begin. After the trial Lawgger is Rs 1,999 a month or Rs 19,999 a year, and you can cancel at any time. Pricing.
Us judgment ko baad me kis-kis judgment ne cite kiya hai, wo dekhiye — aur har baad wale judgment ka wahi paragraph padhiye jisme aapke authority ki baat hai. Phir dekhiye ki baad wali bench badi thi ya nahin. Lawgger har authority ke saath uska good-law status dikhata hai, judgment ke page tak ke pin cite ke saath, aur dus Indian bhashaon me kaam karta hai.
A Table of Authorities is a list of every case, statute and provision cited in a brief, with the page or paragraph at which each appears. Courts in several jurisdictions require one to be filed. Its practical value is as a pre-filing checklist: each entry is something that still has to be verified, including whether the authority remains good law.
Paste a brief. Get a Table of Authorities with a good-law verdict against each case, and a pin cite to the page. A 14-day free trial of the full product, no card required.