There have been two recent Supreme Court judgments on the coal block allocation case. In the run up to the coal block cancellation by the Court, and in its aftermath, much has been written about the issue. However, the ruling itself has not been subjected to any critical assessment. The purpose of this issue of the Law & Policy Brief is to subject the Court's ruling to a closer and critical inspection. This issue analyses the misapplication of the doctrine of arbitrariness followed by a critical analysis of the flawed legal reasoning in the Coal Block Case. The Brief concludes by recognizing that interests of justice would have been better served had the Court followed its reasoning in In Re: Natural Resource Allocation