Court caseAIR 1951 SC 332

A legislature may delegate subordinate or ancillary legislative power but may not delegate its essential legislative function, which consists in declaring the legislative policy and enacting it into a binding rule of conduct. A power to extend existing laws to a territory with modifications is valid, but a power in the executive to repeal or amend the laws in force is an abdication and void.

Three enactments allowed the executive to extend to Delhi, to Ajmer-Merwara and to the Part C States laws in force elsewhere in India, with such restrictions and modifications as it thought fit; the 1950 Act went further and permitted the extension of a law to repeal or amend any corresponding law in force in the Part C State. Doubts about the validity of such wide delegation, after the Privy Council's decision in Jatindra Nath Gupta (1949), led the President to refer three questions to the Supreme Court under Article 143.

All seven judges wrote separate opinions, which the Court later summarised. The majority held that the Indian legislatures are not agents of a sovereign bound by the maxim delegatus non potest delegare, nor possessed of the unlimited delegating power of the British Parliament; they may delegate ancillary and subordinate powers, but the essential legislative function, the determination of policy and its formulation as a rule of conduct, must be performed by the legislature itself. Section 7 of the Delhi Laws Act and s. 2 of the 1947 Act were valid. Section 2 of the Part C States (Laws) Act 1950 was valid except for the words permitting the executive to repeal or amend the corresponding law of the State, which amounted to a transfer of legislative power and were void.