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Landmark Judgments on Right to Life by Dr. Kalpeshkumar L Gupta, Dr. Suvarna Nilakh and Divya Mittal, published by Law & Justice Publishing Co. under the ProBono India banner, is a compilation of the leading decisions on Article 21 of the Constitution. It carries a Foreword by Prof. (Dr.) Amar Pal Singh, Vice Chancellor of Dr. Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University, Lucknow. This is the Edition 2026.

Article 21 is one sentence long. Almost everything it now protects has been read into it by the Supreme Court, case by case, over seventy years — which is why the right to life cannot be studied from the bare text. It has to be studied from the judgments, and that is what this volume collects.

Rights Covered

• Right to privacy
• Right to free legal aid
• Right to personal liberty
• Detention — and protection against unlawful and preventive detention
• Right to health care
• Right to shelter
• Right to die
• Reproductive choice
• Right to choose a partner
• Abortion
• and many more

Key Features

• Edition 2026, published by Law & Justice Publishing Co.
• Compilation of the landmark judgments on the right to life
• Foreword by Prof. (Dr.) Amar Pal Singh, Vice Chancellor, RMLNLU Lucknow
• Part of the ProBono India Landmark Judgments series
• Authored by Dr. Kalpeshkumar L Gupta, Dr. Suvarna Nilakh and Divya Mittal
• Paperback, English
• ISBN 978-93-47041-15-0

The Subject Area

The expansion of Article 21 is the central story of Indian constitutional law. From a narrow reading confined to a procedure established by law, the Supreme Court moved to a right to live with dignity — and then to the conditions that dignity requires.

That reasoning produced the decisions on privacy and informational self-determination; on free legal aid and speedy trial as components of a fair procedure; on the limits of preventive detention and the rights of a person in custody; on health care and the state's obligation to provide emergency treatment; on shelter and livelihood; on the right to die with dignity, advance directives and passive euthanasia; on reproductive autonomy, including the termination of pregnancy; and on the freedom to choose a partner irrespective of caste or religion.

Who Should Buy This Book?

• Constitutional lawyers and advocates in writ practice
• Counsel in public interest litigation and human rights matters
• Judges and judicial officers
• Candidates for judicial service and other competitive examinations
• LL.B. and LL.M. students of constitutional law and human rights
• Research scholars and academicians
• Legal services authorities, legal aid counsel and NGOs
• Members and staff of Human Rights Commissions
• Law libraries and institutional collections

Why Choose This Book?

Every Article 21 argument is an argument from precedent. Counsel asking a court to read a new protection into the right to life is asking it to do again what it has done before, and the persuasive force lies in the line of decisions that got there.

Having those judgments collected in a single volume, arranged by the right they establish, is the most direct way to build that argument — and for a student, the clearest way to see how one sentence of the Constitution came to carry so much.

The association with ProBono India and the series it belongs to also places the book in a body of work aimed at legal aid and public interest practice, where these rights are most often litigated.