Good Law
A judgment is "good law" when it remains binding authority that has not been overruled, reversed, or superseded by later judicial decisions or legislation.
In plain English
Case law is not static. A judgment can be overruled by a larger bench, reversed on appeal, distinguished so narrowly that it no longer applies to comparable facts, or rendered irrelevant by a statutory amendment. Checking good-law status means tracing every subsequent judgment that has cited the case and classifying the treatment: followed, distinguished, doubted, or overruled.
Why it matters
Citing an overruled judgment damages credibility before a court and can lose an otherwise sound argument. This is also the single most consequential failure mode of general-purpose AI in legal work — a model can produce a fluent, correctly-formatted citation to a case that was overruled years ago.
Example
A 2008 High Court judgment on the enforceability of a particular clause type is cited in a brief. A 2019 Supreme Court decision has since taken the opposite view. The 2008 judgment still exists and is still quotable — but it is no longer good law on that point.
Under Indian law
In India, a judgment of a larger Supreme Court bench overrules a smaller one, and Supreme Court decisions bind all High Courts under Article 141 of the Constitution. A High Court judgment binds courts subordinate to it within that state but is only persuasive elsewhere.
How LexVio handles it
LexVio indexes six Indian courts and tribunals — Supreme Court, High Courts, NCLT, ITAT, CCI and CESTAT — with linked citation graphs so subsequent treatment of a judgment can be traced visually.
LexVio — Indian Court ResearchCommon questions
How do you check if an Indian judgment is still good law?
Trace every later judgment that cites it and classify the treatment — followed, distinguished, doubted, or overruled — and separately check whether the underlying statutory provision has since been amended or repealed. A citation graph makes this tractable.
Can a High Court overrule a Supreme Court judgment?
No. Under Article 141 of the Constitution, the law declared by the Supreme Court is binding on all courts in India. Only a larger bench of the Supreme Court can overrule a Supreme Court judgment.
Does a distinguished judgment stop being good law?
Not necessarily. Distinguishing means a later court found the facts materially different, so the earlier ruling did not apply there. The earlier judgment remains good law on its own facts unless it is also doubted or overruled.