Supreme Court of India

The Supreme Court of India is the highest judicial authority in the Republic of India, established under the Constitution of India, which came into force on 26 January 1950. It sits in New Delhi, holds original, appellate and advisory jurisdiction, and is empowered under Article 32 of the Constitution to enforce fundamental rights directly, a power the Court itself has described as part of the Constitution's basic structure. Its most consequential doctrinal development is the basic structure doctrine, announced in Kesavananda Bharati v State of Kerala (1973), which holds that Parliament's power to amend the Constitution under Article 368 does not extend to altering the Constitution's basic structure, a limit found nowhere in the constitutional text itself but read into it by the Court as implicit in the nature of a written constitution. India's legal system blends common law procedure and precedent, inherited from British colonial administration, with substantial areas of personal law drawn from religious and customary sources for matters of marriage, inheritance and family life, which is why comparative law scholarship generally classifies it as a mixed system rather than a pure common law one.