Legal Language and Legal Reasoning Notes | B.A. LL.B. (Five Years) Semester 3 | SPPU | munotes

Contents

Module 01 Legal Language in India

1. A Brief History of Law in India 1
2. The Charter Act of 1833: One Legislature for All India 5
3. Codification, the Law Commissions and Law Reform 11
4. The Languages of Indian Law: The Constitution, the Courts and Translation 20
5. English and Marathi in the Indian Legal System 30

Module 02 Legal Language and its Nature

1. Legal Language: Meaning, Scope, and Legal English against General English 35
2. Characteristics of Legal Language 38
3. Language and Law 46
4. Problems in Contemporary Legal Language and Their Remedies 55
5. The Diseases of Language, and How a Draftsman Treats Them 60
6. Plain Language Drafting: What It Is, and Why the Law Now Asks for It 65
7. Plain Language Techniques: Twelve Ways to Make a Legal Text Clear Without Changing What It Does 69

Module 03 Some Simple Drafts

1. Notices: Their Meaning and Importance, and the Notice before Filing a Suit 75
2. Legal Notices: Landlord and Tenant, Husband and Wife 78
3. Lease: Section 105, and the Line Between a Lease and a Licence 83
4. Leave and Licence in Maharashtra: Why the Law Puts It in Writing 89
5. The Seven Questions to Settle Before You Draft Any Deed of Transfer 95
6. Stamp Duty and Registration: The Two Costs on Every Deed, and How to Read the Schedule 101
7. Gift: Sections 122 to 129, and What Makes a Gift Complete 108
8. Onerous Gifts, and When a Gift Can Be Taken Back 113
9. A Complete Gift Deed 118
10. Sale: What Section 54 Requires, and When Ownership Passes 126
11. The Sale Deed, Head by Head 131
12. A Complete Sale Deed of a Flat, and the Errors in It 136
13. A Release Deed 144
14. The Will: Who May Make One, and How Section 63 Says It Is Executed 147
15. What a Will Must Say, and the Clauses That Cause Litigation 154
16. A Complete Will 162
17. Agency, and What a Power of Attorney Really Does 172
18. A General Power of Attorney 180
19. A Special Power of Attorney 191

Module 04 Advocacy Skills

1. The Equipment of the Lawyer: Learning, Character, Industry and Training 203
2. The Seven Lamps of Advocacy 209
3. Advocacy: Its Meaning, and Advocacy as an Art 214
4. Building the Oral Argument: Roadmap, Time and Prayer 217
5. Writing an Argument: Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion 220
6. Interviewing a Client: Technique and the Record of Two Interviews 224
7. Client Interviewing at a Legal Aid Office: Who Is Entitled, and What the Interview Must Find Out 228
8. Client Counselling: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Is Done 233

Module 05 Reasoning and Argumentation

1. Knowledge: Its Sources, and Skepticism 237
2. Nyaya: The School and Its Means of Knowledge 240
3. Anumana: Inference in Nyaya 245
4. What Logic Is: the Traditional Definitions 251
5. What an Argument Is 258
6. Identifying an Argument 263
7. Deductive Reasoning 268
8. Truth and Validity 273
9. Inductive Reasoning 278
10. What a Categorical Syllogism Is 283
11. The General Rules of the Syllogism 290
12. The Fallacy of Four Terms and the Undistributed Middle 297
13. Illicit Process and the Fallacies of Negative Premises 304
14. The Hypothetical Syllogism: Pure and Mixed 312
15. Rules and Fallacies of the Hypothetical Syllogism 320
16. The Disjunctive Syllogism 327
17. Rules and Fallacies of the Disjunctive Syllogism, with Reference to Law 333
18. What a Fallacy Is, and the Kinds of Fallacy 340
19. Fallacies: Faulty Cause, Faulty Analogy, Generalisation, Bifurcation, Equivocation, Circular Argument and Others 345
20. Fallacies of Relevance 349
21. Fallacies of Presumption 356
22. Fallacies of Ambiguity 362
23. Fallacies of Defective Induction 369
24. The Elements of Legal Reasoning, and Dahyabhai Chhaganbhai Thakker v. State of Gujarat 376