BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 1 English 1 2023-24 Question Paper with Solutions

The speaker is Bassanio, and he is speaking to Portia, who is sitting in the Court of Venice disguised as Balthazar, the young doctor of laws. The scene is the trial in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (Act IV, Scene i).

Bassanio has just offered to pay twice the sum of the bond, and to be bound for ten times it. Failing that, he begs the court to "wrest once the law to your authority: to do a great right, do a little wrong, and curb this cruel devil of his will" — that is, to bend the law slightly in order to save Antonio's life.

The line means "the welfare of the people is the supreme law", that is, the good of the community is the highest end the law can serve, and the ultimate test by which laws are to be judged.

It is taken from Francis Bacon's essay "Of Judicature." Bacon cites it as "the conclusion of the Roman Twelve Tables", and adds that judges ought above all to remember it, and to know that laws, except they be in order to that end, are but things captious, and oracles not well inspired.

The speaker is Sarah Stone, a widow who keeps a small shop licensed to sell tobacco, snuff and tea in Church Lane, Stoniton, in George Eliot's Adam Bede. Her full sentence is: "Those are the clothes. I made them myself, and had kept them by me ever since my last child was born."

The context is the assize trial of Hetty Sorrel for child murder. Sarah Stone had taken Hetty in on a Saturday evening, the 27th of February, when she came to the door looking ill and tired and asked for a lodging; a child was born in the night, and Sarah Stone dressed it in baby-linen of her own making. She is now in the witness box, identifying those clothes as exhibits produced in court, which ties the dead infant to the living one she had seen in Hetty's arms.

Answer: The lawyer asked the witness to tell the court what he had seen on Saturday night.

The changes made, and why:

Answer: Rohini had not informed the others about the change of venue, had she?

The rule applied: the statement is negative, so the tag is positive. The auxiliary is had, repeated without not, and the subject Rohini becomes the pronoun she.

Where the story comes from

Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam tells the story of V. Kathiresan as evidence for the argument of his prescribed essay "The Joy of Reading": that reading, pursued in ordinary hours by an ordinary person, can change the whole direction of a life.

The story

1. Where he began. Kathiresan was employed as Kalam's driver at the Defence Research and Development Laboratory (DRDL) in Hyderabad, in the late 1980s, when Kalam was directing the missile programme there. He had not completed his schooling.

2. How he was noticed. Kalam observed that in the hours of waiting between duties the young man was reading: newspapers, magazines and books, on his own account and with no one telling him to. Nobody had asked him to improve himself; he was doing it in the only time he had.

3. The encouragement. Kalam spoke to him and urged him to study further, and to sit his examinations again.

4. To argue for access rather than ability. Kalam never suggests that Kathiresan was exceptional. He argues that the outcome is repeatable, which is why he names a real, obscure man instead of a famous one.

Why the accusation is nonetheless mistaken

1. An advocate may not lie, and the rule is absolute. Counsel must not state a fact known to be false, must not mislead the court, must not lead evidence known to be fabricated, and must cite binding authority against his own client. These are enforceable duties under the Advocates Act, 1961 and the Bar Council of India Rules, and breach is professional misconduct.

2. Arguing a side is not lying. It is the design of an adversarial system, which assumes the truth emerges best when each case is put at its highest by somebody committed to it and decided by an impartial third party. The advocate is one half of a machine, not the whole of it.

3. Defending the guilty is a constitutional duty. Article 22(1) guarantees every accused the right to be defended by counsel of choice, and Article 39A requires the State to provide legal aid. The advocate does not certify innocence; he compels the State to prove its case. Everyone is entitled to a defence, or nobody is.

4. Technicalities are protections. Limitation, jurisdiction and procedure exist to prevent stale, arbitrary and lawless proceedings, and look like escapes only when they benefit somebody we dislike.

Who he is

Jake Brigance is the young lawyer at the centre of John Grisham's A Time to Kill, practising alone in Clanton, Ford County, Mississippi. He defends Carl Lee Hailey, a Black father charged with capital murder for shooting the two men who attacked his ten-year-old daughter Tonya.

How he is portrayed

1. Young, able and not yet established. He is a competent trial lawyer in a small town, ambitious, short of money, and without the resources of a firm behind him. Grisham makes his ordinariness part of the point: there is nothing exceptional about him except what he is willing to do.

2. Courageous at enormous personal cost. No other lawyer in Clanton will touch the case. Taking it costs him his house, which is burned down, his family, who leave for his wife's parents, and very nearly his life. His secretary's husband dies after threats.

The occasion

Plato's Apology records the trial of Socrates at Athens in 399 B.C. After his conviction and the sentence of death, he addresses the court, and it is there that he sets out what he thinks about dying.

His view, in five steps

1. To fear death is to pretend to a knowledge one does not have. Nobody knows whether death is a good or an evil, and to fear it is to think oneself wise about what one does not know. That is the very ignorance he has spent his life exposing in others, and he will not commit it himself.

2. He fears doing wrong far more than dying. He tells the court that he will not give up his questioning to save his life, because to abandon what he believes right, out of fear, is a certain evil, while death may be no evil at all.

I am a first-year student of the five-year B.L.S. LL.B. course at ____ Law College, Mumbai. My coursework in Legal Method, Legal Language and Economics has given me a grounding in legal research, drafting and case analysis, and I have completed a certificate course in legal writing. I am familiar with SCC Online and Manupatra, and I have taken part in two intra-collegiate moot court competitions, reaching the semi-final in the second.

I am particularly interested in your firm's civil and commercial litigation practice, and I would be glad to assist with research, case briefs, indexing and any drafting entrusted to me under supervision. I am available for four weeks from 1 December 2024, during the winter vacation of my college, and can attend court with your juniors as required.

My bio-data is enclosed. I would welcome the opportunity of an interview at your convenience.

Thanking you,

Yours faithfully,
Rohan Kulkarni

Encl.: Bio-data

Declaration: I hereby declare that the particulars given above are true to the best of my knowledge.

Place: Mumbai
Date: 31 January 2024 Rohan Kulkarni

The position is as follows. The main sewer line along Marol Church Road has been leaking since about 20 November 2023. There are three visible leaks, the worst of them at the junction opposite building No. 14, where sewage has been standing on the road surface for more than ten weeks. Two manhole covers near the internal lane are broken and the chambers overflow after any rain. The vertical drainage stack serving the row of shops has cracked at the second joint and discharges directly onto the footpath.

The consequences. About 180 families and eleven shops are affected. There is a continuous stench along the whole road; standing sewage has bred mosquitoes and there have been four reported cases of dengue in these buildings since December; the road surface has been undermined and is subsiding at the junction; and an open chamber on an unlit lane is a danger to children.

Yours faithfully,
Rohan Kulkarni
(Secretary, Green Meadows Co-operative Housing Society)

Copy to: The Assistant Commissioner, K/East Ward; the Executive Engineer (Sewerage Operations), K/East Ward; the Medical Officer of Health, K/East Ward.

Panini's book is something more than a mere grammar. It has been described by the Soviet Professor F.

Th. Stcherabatsky, of Leningrad, as one of the greatest productions of the human mind.

Panini is still the standard authority on Sanskrit grammar, though subsequent grammarians have added to it and interpreted it. It is interesting to note that Panini mentions the Greek script.

This indicates that there were some kind of contacts between India and the Greeks long before Alexander came to the East. The study of astronomy was specially pursued and it often merged with astrology.

Various surgical instruments are mentioned by Sushruta, as well as operations including amputation of limbs, abdominal, caesarean section, cataract, etc. Wounds were sterilised by fumigator.

In the third or fourth century B.C., there were hospitals for animals also. This was probably due to the influence of Jainism and Buddhism with their emphasis on non-violence.

Title: Ancient India's Sciences: Grammar, Astronomy and Medicine

2. The three subjects were identified and kept in the passage's own order: grammar (Panini), astronomy, and medicine and surgery (Chakra and Sushruta). The passage is a survey, not an argument, so the precis must preserve the survey's shape.

3. Detail was compressed, not deleted. The long list of what the textbooks cover, "surgery, obstetrics, baths, diet, hygiene, infant feeding, and medical education", is reduced to a representative four; the list of operations, "amputation of limbs, abdominal, caesarean section, cataract", is reduced to "major operations described".

4. Two things were kept because they are the passage's real points: that Panini mentions the Greek script, which proves contact before Alexander, and that the approach was experimental, since dissection was practised. These are the only claims in the passage that argue rather than describe.

5. It is in the third person, in the writer's own words, in one connected paragraph, and introduces nothing that is not in the original.

What the right is. Every citizen of India who is eighteen years of age or above and is ordinarily resident in a constituency is entitled to be registered as a voter, under Article 326 of the Constitution and the Representation of the People Act, 1950. The voting age was brought down from twenty-one to eighteen by the Sixty-first Amendment in 1988. If you are eighteen, this right is already yours.

What kind of right it is. Here is a thing worth knowing, and it surprises most people. The Supreme Court has held that the right to vote is a statutory right rather than a fundamental right, though the freedom to express a choice at the ballot is protected under Article 19(1)(a). That makes it more fragile than we assume, not less valuable: a right conferred by statute is a right that has to be claimed, registered and used, or it does nothing at all.

What this Committee will do. We will hold a registration camp in college next month, with volunteers to help first-time voters fill Form 6 and check the roll, and we will extend it to the residents of the neighbouring area as part of our legal aid work.

Friends, a law student who does not vote is in a strange position: we spend five years learning how the law is made, and decline to take part in choosing the people who make it. Please register. Please check your name. And on polling day, please go.

Thank you.

The description, and who made it

The phrase is Henry Fielding's own, in Joseph Andrews, Book IV, Chapter III, and it is worth quoting exactly, because the whole answer turns on the second half of the sentence:

This Scout was one of those fellows who, without any knowledge of the law, or being bred to it, take upon them, in defiance of an act of Parliament, to act as lawyers in the country, and are called so. They are the pests of society, and a scandal to a profession, to which indeed they do not belong, and which owes to such kind of rascallions the ill-will which weak persons bear towards it.

Fielding is not attacking the legal profession. He says the opposite in terms: these men do not belong to it, they act in defiance of an Act of Parliament, and the profession's bad name is owed to them. Any answer that treats this as an attack on lawyers has misread the passage.

5. He treats the courts as an instrument. His plan is to carry Joseph before Justice Frolick, who, "upon hearing your ladyship's name, will commit him without any farther questions". He tells Lady Booby plainly that "the laws of this land are not so vulgar to permit a mean fellow to contend with one of your ladyship's fortune".

6. He knows what committal means and enjoys it. He praises the justice for having "taken several poor off our hands that the law would never lay hold on", and describes with pleasure how a man committed to Bridewell is "either starved or eat up by vermin in a month's time".

7. He delivers. Joseph and Fanny are afterwards taken before Justice Frolick on a charge of cutting a hazel twig from a hedge, valued at threepence, and are committed. The charge is a fabrication and the committal is real.

Critical evaluation: is "pests of society" a fair description?

Yes, and the reasons can be listed.

1. He does the profession's harm without its duties. An attorney is bound by rules of conduct and answerable to a court. Scout is bound by nothing, because he is not admitted to anything, and Fielding's point is that the damage is done precisely by the man outside the regulated profession.

1. The real power is Lady Booby's, not Scout's. He is an instrument. She has the money, the influence and the motive, and the plan is hers before he arrives. A pest is a nuisance; the danger here is the person paying him.

2. The system invited him. There were no cheap lawyers in the country. Where a legal system is expensive, slow and remote, unqualified practitioners fill the space, and driving them out without providing anything in their place leaves the poor with nobody at all.

3. His legal reasoning is not stupid. "Settled in fact" and "settled in law", the argument that marriage co-operating with the law will carry law into fact, are real distinctions in the settlement cases. He is not ignorant of everything; he is unprincipled, which is worse.

4. Fielding's contrast makes the point better than the abuse does. Parson Adams, who has no legal training either, gets the law right and refuses to bend it, at the cost of his living. The difference between the two men is character and not qualification, and that complicates Fielding's own attack on the unqualified.

The text

The prescribed piece is Dr B. R. Ambedkar's broadcast "Why Indian Labour is Determined to Win the War", delivered from the Bombay station of All India Radio while he was Labour Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council (1942 to 1946), and reprinted in Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Volume 10. It was made at the height of the Second World War, at a moment when much of the Indian political leadership was refusing to co-operate with the war effort, and its purpose is to explain why Indian Labour took the opposite view.

What Ambedkar means by the New Order

1. It is the price of the war, not a by-product of it. Labour, he says, is aware that the only compensation for the cost of this war is the establishment of a New Order in which liberty, equality and fraternity will not be mere slogans but will become facts of life.

The approach of Indian Labour towards achieving it

1. Win the war first, because everything else depends on it. Labour insists that success in the war is the primary condition for the materialisation of these ideals. Without victory there can be no self-government and no self-determination, and independence, he says, would be idle twaddle. A defeated country does not get to choose its social order.

2. Co-operate rather than obstruct. While others were non-co-operating, Labour was actively co-operating in the prosecution of the war, and Ambedkar defends that choice as a considered political position rather than as loyalty to the British.

3. Refuse to make a fetish of nationalism. This is the most striking passage in the broadcast. "Labour is not prepared to make a fetish of nationalism." If nationalism means the worship of the ancient past, the discarding of everything that is not local in origin and colour, then Labour cannot accept nationalism as its creed. He adds the line that has outlived the broadcast: Labour cannot allow "the living faith of the dead to become the dead faith of the living."

3. His attack on nationalism-as-worship-of-the-past is directed exactly where it needed to be. A movement that defined Indian identity by its ancient tradition was defining it by the very texts that sanctified caste, and Ambedkar's refusal is the same refusal that runs through Annihilation of Caste.

4. The record backs the argument. He did not only ask for a New Order; he legislated pieces of it while he had the portfolio.

Against him, and these must be stated, because the question says "critically":

1. The position was of great use to the British, and it was made from inside their government. Co-operation in the war effort was exactly what the Viceroy's Council wanted said, and a broadcast on All India Radio by a Member of that Council is not a neutral document. Ambedkar's own interest in the position he was arguing must be acknowledged.

2. It divided the anti-colonial movement at the moment of the Quit India agitation, and his opponents said so at the time.

The question

Hetty Sorrel is tried at the Stoniton assizes in George Eliot's Adam Bede for child murder, convicted on the verdict "Guilty", and sentenced to death. The question asks whether that outcome was inevitable. The honest answer is a divided one: on the case as it was actually conducted the sentence was unavoidable, and it was not inevitable in any other sense — not on the facts, not on the law as it might have been argued, and not on the evidence that existed and was never called.

The case for saying it was inevitable

1. The evidence was complete and unanswerable. Sarah Stone proved a living child, clothed in linen she had made herself and could identify, in Hetty's keeping. John Olding proved a dead child concealed under timber-choppings in a hollow. The clothes joined the two halves. Every link was proved by a witness with nothing to gain and no motive to lie.

2. The lesser verdict was available. The charge required an intention to kill or an act done knowing it would kill. Abandonment in panic by a girl who then returned is a different thing, and the law of the period had a separate and far lesser offence of concealment of birth for exactly such cases.

3. The medical evidence was never tested. Nobody established how the child died, or whether it would have lived had it been found. Sarah Stone says the child was alive when she left; Olding says a body was found. What happened in between was never proved, only inferred.

4. Her state of mind was never put before the court. A girl of seventeen, alone on the road, delivered without help, walking for days: any of it might have gone to whether she was capable of forming the intention the charge required, and none of it was led.

5. Her silence was not evidence and was treated as though it were. She was not obliged to speak, and no adverse inference should have been drawn. In practice the court had nothing to weigh against the prosecution because the defence put up nothing at all.

The proposition

Luigi and Angelo Capello, the Italian twins visiting Dawson's Landing in Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, are charged with the murder of Judge York Driscoll. The claim in the question is that nothing but David "Pudd'nhead" Wilson's fingerprint discovery could have cleared them. The proposition is correct, and the way to prove it is to build the case against them first and then show what was and was not available to answer it.

The circumstantial case against the twins

1. Presence at the scene. They were found in the room with the dead man immediately after the killing, and never disputed it.

2. Possession of the weapon. Luigi was holding the Indian dagger when the alarm was raised.

3. Ownership of the weapon. The dagger was their own property, brought from abroad, shown about the town, and known to be theirs. It had been advertised as stolen, with a reward, and the advertisement described it exactly.

3. The Misses Clarkson, three witnesses who would say they met a veiled young woman leaving Judge Driscoll's premises by the back gate a few minutes after the cries for help.

4. Wilson's own standing, which was worth nothing. He had been the town's joke for over twenty years.

Why that was not enough

1. The absence of blood was ignored, because the town had already convicted them. An explanation was always available: the blow was clean, the blood went elsewhere. Negative evidence rarely overcomes a positive scene.

2. The veiled woman was a lead and not an answer. She was unidentified and unproduced, and pointed to nobody. It suggested somebody else had been there; it did not establish who, and a jury cannot acquit on a suggestion when two men were found with the knife.

3. Their own account was the account every guilty man gives. "We came upon the body and picked up the knife" is exactly what a murderer discovered at the scene would say.

4. He went further and named the murderer. The print matched slides taken years earlier of Tom Driscoll, sitting in the courtroom: "The murderer of your friend and mine, Judge Driscoll of the generous and kindly spirit, sits in your midst."

Conclusion

The proposition in the question is correct. Without the fingerprint, the twins had an unsupported denial, an absence of blood that nobody credited, and an unidentified woman in a veil, set against presence, possession, ownership, motive, opportunity, two eyewitnesses to the scene and the settled opinion of the town. On that material a nineteenth-century Missouri jury would have convicted them, and the reader is meant to know it.

What saved them was not a better argument but a different kind of evidence: a physical fact, independent of every witness's honesty or memory, which the court could test with its own hands before it relied on it.

3. He refuses every reasonable settlement. Offered the principal, then twice, then thrice the sum, and Bassanio's bond for ten times it, he refuses all of it. He wants the life and not the money.

4. He can give no reason for it. Asked why, he answers only that it is his "humour", that he bears "a certain loathing" to Antonio, as some men cannot abide a gaping pig or a harmless necessary cat. The refusal to justify is chilling.

5. He is unmoved by his daughter as a person. On hearing that Jessica has fled with his money and jewels he cries out for his ducats and his daughter in the same breath, and later says he would rather see her dead at his foot with the jewels in her ear.

6. He is exultant at Antonio's ruin. The news of the wrecked argosies delights him, and he says he is glad of it.

7. He appeals to law with no interest in justice. "My deeds upon my head! I crave the law, the penalty and forfeit of my bond."

5. His occupation was forced on him. Jews were barred from most trades, and moneylending at interest was forbidden to Christians and left to them. Antonio then "lends out money gratis and brings down the rate of usance", attacking the one trade Shylock is permitted.

6. His daughter is taken with the help of Antonio's circle, along with his money and his wife's turquoise ring, which he says he would not have given for a wilderness of monkeys.

7. His own answer is unanswered. "Hath not a Jew eyes?" ends with "The villainy you teach me I will execute", and nothing in the play replies to it.

8. His argument in court is the strongest anyone makes. Venice keeps slaves, whom you bought and use as your asses and your dogs; would you free them and marry them to your heirs? You answer, the slaves are ours. So the pound of flesh is his, dearly bought. If you deny it, the law of Venice has no force.

9. The judgment destroys him utterly. Half his goods to Antonio, half to the State, and Antonio's "mercy" is that he must become a Christian and settle his property on the daughter who robbed him. He answers "I am content", says he is not well, and never appears again.

Conclusion

Both halves of the proposition are true, and the play is built so that they cannot be separated. Shylock is a villain in what he does and a victim in what has been done to him, and Shakespeare's achievement is to stage the second without excusing the first. He gives the wronged man the strongest speeches and the worst intention, gives his enemies the victory and the ugliest behaviour, and declines to tell the audience what to conclude. The play does not say the trial was unjust. It shows us the trial, and leaves the judgment to us.