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Nine judges of the Supreme Court sat for five days from October 30 to hear arguments regarding the scope of power of Parliament to amend the Constitution. However, a 13-judge bench of the Supreme Court considered the same question of the scope of the amending power under Article 368 in 1973 in the celebrated case of Keshavanand Bharti.

Soon after the judgment in Keshava-nand, Nani Palkhivala, who appeared in the case, wrote, "The effect of the majority judgment of the Supreme Court may be summed up thus: Parliament cannot, in the exercise of its amending power, alter the basic structure or framework of the Constitution...

The amending power cannot be so exercised as to make the Constitution suffer a loss of identity". The majority decision of the five-judge bench in the Golaknath case had taken the view that even an amendment of the Constitution under Article 368 could be questioned on the violation of a fundamental right.

This was overruled in Keshavanand and it was held that the constituent power of Parliament could not be questioned on the violation of a fundamental right and the only limitation was that such an amendment could not alter the basic structure of the Constitution.

One of the points before the nine judges of the Constitution bench is whether an Act which was struck down by courts on the ground of violating fundamental rights could be validated by a constitutional amendment by putting it in the Ninth Schedule and giving it immunity from judicial review.