The Supreme Court struck down a 2022 Karnataka law that attempted to validate a 2011 civil service selection process already invalidated by courts. The Court held that a legislature cannot directly annul a judicial judgment; it may only remove the legal basis on which the judgment rested. Because the Karnataka legislature did neither — it simply declared the tainted selection valid — the law amounted to an unconstitutional legislative override of a judicial verdict, violating the separation of powers doctrine.

This ruling applies a well-established constitutional doctrine: the separation of powers bars the legislature from directly nullifying a court judgment. The doctrine originates in Madras & Southern Mahratta Railway Co. v. Bezwada Municipality (1944) and was crystallised by the Supreme Court in Shri Prithvi Cotton Mills Ltd. v. Broach Borough Municipality (1969), which laid down the test still used today.

The test has two limbs. First, a legislature may not simply declare that a specific court verdict shall not stand — that is a direct annulment and is unconstitutional. Second, a legislature may enact a law that removes or alters the very legal foundation (the statutory provision, rule, or factual basis) on which the court's decision rested. If the foundation is validly removed, the judgment becomes unenforceable not because the legislature overruled it, but because the law it applied no longer exists.

The distinction is critical for CLAT PG: the legislature acts on the law, not on the judgment. When Karnataka's 2022 law simply declared the 2011 selection 'valid' without touching the underlying Rules or criteria the court had found defective, it crossed the line — it targeted the verdict itself, not its legal basis.

This doctrine is rooted in Articles 50, 121, and 211 (separation of judiciary from executive/legislature) and the basic structure doctrine (Kesavananda Bharati, 1973), which protects judicial review as unamendable. The ruling also implicates Article 14 (arbitrariness in public employment) because reinstating a tainted selection without a valid legal cure treats similarly situated candidates unequally.