Five judgments, each read against the judgment itself rather than a summary of it. Every one carries its citation, its bench, and a link to the PDF on the Supreme Court's own site.
A word on how to read them. CLAT does not test whether you can name a case. It tests whether you can follow reasoning. So the useful thing in each entry below is the shape of the argument — and you will notice how often that shape is the same one: a rule is challenged, and the question becomes whether it has a rational connection to the purpose it was made for.
That is the test you will meet over and over in constitutional passages, and these are five worked examples of it.
Dr. Jaya Thakur v. Government of India
2026 INSC 97 · 30 January 2026 · J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan, JJ.
The question. Whether the unavailability of gender-segregated toilets and the lack of access to menstrual absorbents violates the right to equality of adolescent girl students under Article 14.
What the Court held.
- The right to life under Article 21 includes the right to menstrual health, and access to safe, effective and affordable menstrual hygiene management is part of it.
- Substantive equality under Article 14 requires attention to the barriers that stop rights from becoming real; the State must remedy structural disadvantage.
- Free education under Article 21A and the 2009 Act includes all charges or expenses that would prevent a child completing elementary education.
- A privately managed school in breach of the 2009 Act's norms is liable to be de-recognised; for a State-run school, the State is accountable.
- Directions were issued to States and Union Territories on gender-segregated toilets, free sanitary napkins, menstrual hygiene corners, waste disposal and awareness. The matter was treated as part-heard.
The reasoning worth borrowing. Two moves. First, reading a specific entitlement into the general right to life — a recurring pattern in Indian constitutional law and a favourite of passage-setters. Second, the substantive conception of equality: the argument that formal equal treatment is not enough where structural barriers stop a right being exercised. A passage that gives you a facially neutral rule and facts showing it excludes a class of people is asking you to run this argument.
Harish Rana v. Union of India
2026 INSC 222 · 11 March 2026 · J.B. Pardiwala and K.V. Viswanathan, JJ.
The question. Whether clinically assisted nutrition and hydration is to be regarded as "medical treatment".
What the Court held.
- CANH, administered through a surgically placed tube under medical supervision, is medical treatment and not mere basic care, even when given at home.
- The best-interest principle applies wherever an incompetent patient cannot decide for himself, at every stage and to every decision-maker — medical boards, next of kin and courts.
- The correct question is not whether it is in the patient's best interests that he should die, but whether it is in his best interests that his life be prolonged by continued treatment.
- The inquiry is holistic, begins from a strong but rebuttable presumption in favour of preserving life, and weighs both medical and non-medical considerations, including what the patient would have wanted.
- On the facts, with parents and medical boards in agreement, the Court directed that treatment including CANH be withdrawn, waived the reconsideration period, and directed palliative and end-of-life care.
- Systemic directions followed on intimations to Judicial Magistrates and on district panels of medical practitioners for secondary medical boards.
The reasoning worth borrowing. The reframing is the whole judgment. Notice what the Court does: it refuses the question as posed and substitutes a different one. That move — the question is not X but Y — is the single most transferable thing here, and a Legal Reasoning passage that offers you an emotionally loaded option is usually testing whether you will answer the question actually asked.
Also worth noticing: a classification argument again, but about a thing rather than a person. Is CANH treatment or care? The legal consequence follows entirely from which category it falls into.
Union of India v. Rohith Nathan
2026 INSC 230 · 11 March 2026 · Pamidighantam Sri Narasimha and R. Mahadevan, JJ.
The question. Whether a clarificatory letter of 14 October 2004 can override the Office Memorandum of 8 September 1993 laying down the criteria for excluding the creamy layer from OBC reservation.
What the Court held.
- A clarificatory letter cannot override an Office Memorandum issued in exercise of executive power under Article 162. It must be read as explaining the parent instrument, and cannot introduce a substantive condition the parent does not contain.
- Until equivalence of posts in PSUs and similar organisations is evaluated and notified, the entitlement of children of parents employed there is decided by the income and wealth test.
- Treating children of PSU or private-sector employees differently from children of government servants, when they are similarly placed, amounts to hostile discrimination.
- The appeals were dismissed, with a direction to reconsider the claims within six months.
The reasoning worth borrowing. A hierarchy-of-instruments point, which is unusually examinable: a subordinate document explaining a parent document cannot add to it. Passages test this with a rule and a later circular that appears to extend it — and the answer is that the circular cannot do what it purports to do.
Then the equality argument, in its cleanest form: two groups are similarly placed, the rule treats them differently, and there is no basis for the distinction. Note the term the Court uses — hostile discrimination — which is the vocabulary of this argument.
Hamsaanandini Nanduri v. Union of India
2026 INSC 246 · 17 March 2026 · J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan, JJ.
The question. Whether the three-month age limit in Section 60(4) of the Social Security Code, 2020 is discriminatory against women who adopt a child aged three months or above.
What the Court held.
- The distinction has no rational nexus with the object of the Code: maternity benefit is associated with motherhood, not with the process of childbirth, and women adopting an older child are similarly situated to those adopting a younger one.
- Adoption is an equal exercise of the right to reproductive and decisional autonomy under Article 21.
- The child's best interests are paramount.
- The age limit is also incapable of practical implementation, since a child is unlikely to be under three months by the time it is declared legally free for adoption.
The reasoning worth borrowing. This is the classification test at its most transferable, and the cleanest of the five for that purpose.
Work through the structure: identify the object of the measure (supporting motherhood); identify the distinction the rule draws (children under three months against children over); ask whether the distinction serves the object (it does not, because the object is motherhood rather than childbirth). That is the whole argument, and it is exactly the sequence a CLAT passage on Article 14 will ask you to run.
The practical-implementation point is a second, independent ground — a rule that cannot work in practice is vulnerable on that basis alone.
Association for Democratic Reforms v. Election Commission of India
2026 INSC 564 · 27 May 2026 · Surya Kant, CJI, and Joymalya Bagchi, J.
The question. Whether the Election Commission of India has the power to conduct the impugned Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls.
What the Court held. The Commission's Special Intensive Revision was upheld, with safeguards concerning citizenship. The provisions engaged were Articles 324 and 327 and Part XV of the Constitution, Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, Rule 21A of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, and the Citizenship Act, 1955.
The reasoning worth borrowing. The outcome shape matters more than the detail here, and it is the outcome shape candidates most often get wrong: the measure survives, but conditions are attached.
Aspirants tend to read a challenge as binary — struck down or upheld. A great deal of constitutional litigation ends in the third place: the power exists, and its exercise is circumscribed. When a passage offers you "valid" and "invalid" and a third option that reads "valid, subject to X", that third option is live far more often than instinct suggests.
The pattern across all five
Three of the five turn on the same question: does this distinction have a rational connection to the purpose of the rule that draws it?
That is not a coincidence, and it is the single most valuable thing on this page. If you can run that test reliably — object, distinction, connection — you can handle most constitutional passages CLAT sets, whether or not you have heard of the case they are built on.
The second pattern: in four of the five, the humane answer and the legally correct answer point the same way, and in every one the Court gets there by an argument rather than by sympathy. A CLAT passage will sometimes separate them deliberately, and the correct answer is the one the stated principle produces.
How to use these
Read one judgment in full. Not five summaries — one judgment. Hamsaanandini Nanduri is the best starting point: the reasoning is clean, the structure is visible, and it is the argument you will meet most often.
Do not memorise the names. Recognition is enough, and it comes free with understanding.
Notice the vocabulary. "Rational nexus", "similarly situated", "hostile discrimination", "best interests", "rebuttable presumption". These recur in passages, and the legal terms glossary covers the rest.
For how constitutional passages are built around exactly this reasoning, see constitutional law in CLAT Legal Reasoning. For the monthly current affairs that these sit inside, the current affairs archive.
And to find out how fast you actually read this kind of prose under a clock, the free Diagnostic Test times a full Legal Reasoning section and shows you where the minutes went.