MU's Unfinished Sentence, and What This Book Did About It

In one line

MU's topic 8 stops at the words "Control with special", and this chapter says so, explains what was almost certainly going to follow, and sets out exactly how the missing words were replaced so that a student is neither misled nor left short.

What is printed

The syllabus for this paper, circular UG/165 of 2016-17, prints Module IV as three lines. The third reads:

8. Disposal and Dumping of Hazardous Wastes: Transnational Problem and Control with special

The module ends there. The next thing on the page is the next paper.

Two smaller printing marks are carried through this book unchanged, because a student comparing the notes with the university's page should find them identical. Topic 7 is printed with a space before its full stop, and topic 2 is the only topic that ends in a full stop at all.

What was going to follow

"With special" is the opening of "with special reference to", a phrase MU uses across her syllabi to name the particular instrument or jurisdiction a topic is to be studied through.

What it was going to refer to is not on the page, and it is not in this circular or in any other. The truncation was searched for in the master syllabus, in the surrounding papers, and in the examination papers themselves, and nothing completes it.

The two candidates, on the evidence, are these.

• "with special reference to the Basel Convention", which is the instrument the topic is about and the one MU's own examiners set. One printed paper asks directly for the salient features of the Basel Convention, and another sets Disposal of Hazardous waste as a short note.
• "with special reference to India", which is the formula used in comparable Indian LL.M. syllabi and which would explain why the examiners expect the Indian rules and the Indian cases.

This book did not choose between them. It taught both, because both are examinable on the evidence of the printed papers, and because guessing at a university's intention and then teaching only the guess is how a gap becomes a failure.

What was done about it, in full

The general problem is recorded in the syllabus file in this book's authorities folder, and the method is this.

Step one: treat the printed line as the outer boundary of the topic, not as its content. MU printed a heading. A heading is a promise that the subject will be examined, not a statement of what will be asked.

Step two: read what MU actually examined. Seven printed question papers were transcribed for this book. From them, this topic has been examined by direct questions on the salient features of the Basel Convention, by short notes on Disposal of Hazardous waste and on Hazardous materials, and by questions on the control of multinational corporations that expect Bhopal and absolute liability. Those are MU's own words, and they are the strongest available evidence of what "with special reference to" was going to say.