The Supreme Court in Sanjay Prasad v. Madhusudan Dwivedi (2026 INSC 1128) questioned whether High Courts can classify writ jurisdiction under Article 226 as either civil or criminal to trigger intra-court appeal restrictions. The bench observed that Article 226 confers a single, undivided writ jurisdiction and that grafting a civil-criminal distinction onto it creates a division absent from the constitutional text, potentially restricting a litigant's right to an intra-court appeal impermissibly.

Article 226 of the Constitution empowers every High Court to issue writs — including habeas corpus, mandamus, prohibition, quo warranto, and certiorari — to any person or authority, including the government, for enforcement of fundamental rights or for any other purpose. The jurisdiction is constitutionally unitary: the text makes no distinction based on the nature of the underlying dispute.

The controversy in Sanjay Prasad arises from a practice in some High Courts of labelling a writ petition as arising from a 'criminal matter' or a 'civil matter' and then applying the Letters Patent / High Court Rules on intra-court appeals differently depending on that label. An intra-court appeal (a Division Bench appeal against a Single Judge's order) is a creature of the Letters Patent or the relevant High Court Act, not of the Constitution. If a writ is tagged 'criminal,' the appeal may be barred on the ground that criminal writs are not appealable under the Letters Patent.

The Supreme Court's questioning strikes at this practice. The constitutional doctrine, confirmed in cases like S.A.L. Narayan Row v. Ishwarlal Bhagwandas (1965) and Umaji Keshao Meshram v. Radhikabai (1986), is that Article 226 jurisdiction is sui generis — it is neither purely civil nor purely criminal but a distinct constitutional remedy. Once that principle is accepted, slicing that jurisdiction along civil-criminal lines to selectively bar intra-court appeals becomes constitutionally suspect. CLAT PG examiners frequently test the interplay between the constitutional source of a right and a statutory/procedural restriction placed on its exercise.