The Supreme Court in Smt. Rano Singh v. Sh. Gurbax Singh held that Article 300A of the Constitution protects every person's right not to be deprived of property except by authority of law. The Court clarified that the State cannot dispossess a person of their property without following due process, and that mere executive action unsupported by a valid law is insufficient. The ruling reinforces that Article 300A is a constitutional right, not merely a statutory entitlement.

Article 300A, inserted by the 44th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1978, provides that no person shall be deprived of his property save by authority of law. Before this amendment, the right to property was a Fundamental Right under Article 19(1)(f) and Article 31. When the 44th Amendment removed it from Part III, the right to property was downgraded to a constitutional right under Part XII but ceased to be enforceable under Article 32 directly.

The Supreme Court has progressively expanded the content of Article 300A through a line of judgments. The Court has held that 'authority of law' means not just the existence of a law, but that the law must be valid, the procedure must be followed, and there must be no arbitrariness. In Vidya Devi v. State of H.P. (2020), the Court held that the State cannot take over land without paying compensation, even for public purposes, if no formal acquisition process is followed.

In the present ruling, the Court reaffirms several key propositions: (1) dispossession without legal sanction violates Article 300A; (2) executive action alone is not 'authority of law'; (3) the right survives even when the property is not acquired through the Land Acquisition Act; and (4) courts can remedy such violations through writ jurisdiction under Article 226, since Article 300A is a constitutional right even if not a fundamental right.

The critical distinction for CLAT PG is that Article 300A cannot be enforced under Article 32 (Supreme Court's writ jurisdiction for fundamental rights) but can be enforced under Article 226 (High Court's broader writ jurisdiction). This procedural nuance is a favourite examiner angle.