BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 1 English 1 2024-25 Question Paper with Solutions

The Lady is Lady Booby, and the speaker is Parson Abraham Adams, the curate, in Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (Book IV, Chapter II).

In the context the terms carry two meanings at once. Lady Booby has ordered Adams to publish the banns of Joseph and Fanny no more, and when he will not agree she threatens to recommend to "your master, the doctor" that he "discard you from his service": that is, to have the rector who holds the living turn him out of his curacy and his livelihood. Adams answers by taking the words in their religious sense — he is in the service of a Master who will never discard him for doing his duty, and if the doctor turns him from his cure, God will provide another.

The speaker is John Olding, a labourer, and the text is George Eliot's Adam Bede.

He is giving evidence at the assize trial of Hetty Sorrel, and describing how he came upon the body of her newborn child, concealed under wood chippings in a hollow of the ground beneath a bush.

Answer: The king had never before led his troops in battle, had he?

The rule applied: the sentence contains never, so it is a negative statement and takes a positive tag. The auxiliary is had, which is repeated without not, and the subject the king becomes he.

The elements:

1. Sender: the person with something to convey.
2. Encoding: putting the idea into words, symbols or gestures.
3. Message: the content itself.
4. Channel: the medium, speech, letter, email, telephone, gesture.
5. Decoding: the receiver's interpretation of what arrived.
6. Receiver: the person for whom the message is intended.
7. Feedback: the receiver's response, which tells the sender whether the message arrived as intended. Feedback is what distinguishes communication from mere broadcasting.
8. Noise: anything that distorts the message at any stage, physical noise, bad handwriting, jargon, prejudice, inattention, or a poor connection.

The accusation

The charge is old and widely believed: that a lawyer is paid to make the worse case appear the better, defends people known to be guilty, and will argue on Monday the opposite of what was argued on Friday. Aristophanes made it, Dickens made it through Serjeant Buzfuz, and it is made in every generation since.

Where the accusation gets its force

1. Advocates argue for a side, not for the truth. Counsel is retained to present one case as strongly as it can be put, and does not tell the court what is against the client unless obliged to.

2. Guilty people are defended. To a layman, defending someone who did it looks like assisting a lie.

3. Opposite positions on different days. The same advocate may argue for a strict construction in one matter and a liberal one in the next.

3. Defending the guilty is a constitutional duty. Under Article 22(1) every accused has 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 ensures the State proves 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. They look like escapes only when they benefit someone we dislike.

5. The duty to the court outranks the duty to the client. An advocate is an officer of the court first. That single rule is the answer to the whole charge.

Conclusion

The saying confuses partisanship with dishonesty. A lawyer is required to be one-sided and forbidden to be untruthful, and the two are not the same thing. The profession has its Dodsons and Foggs, as every profession has; but the standing rules of the Bar are aimed precisely at the conduct the proverb alleges, which is itself evidence that the charge is understood and answered rather than ignored.

3. With mock-heroic dignity. O. Henry describes his ambitions in the language of grand enterprise, his bench as his "winter quarters" and his schemes as a campaign, so that a shabby man's plan to be arrested is narrated in the register of a statesman's policy. The gap between the language and the facts is where the comedy lives.

4. Through a sequence of failures. He dines and cannot pay, and is thrown out rather than charged. He breaks a shop window and is not believed, because a criminal would not stay to talk to a policeman. He behaves offensively to a woman, who turns out to be willing. He shouts and sings, and is taken for a college boy celebrating. He takes an umbrella from a man who had taken it himself. Five attempts, five failures, each turning on the same joke: the law will not attend to him.

5. Sympathetically but without sentiment. O. Henry does not ask us to weep for Soapy. He gives him wit, resourcefulness and a certain gallantry, and lets the reader like him.

6. As a man capable of change. Outside a quiet church he hears an organ playing an anthem he knew as a boy, and it restores his mother, roses, ambitions and clean thoughts. He resolves to find work, to be somebody again. The presentation deepens in that instant from comic to serious.

Review: Wings of Fire, by A. P. J. Abdul Kalam with Arun Tiwari

Title: Wings of Fire: An Autobiography
Authors: A. P. J. Abdul Kalam with Arun Tiwari
Publisher: Universities Press, 1999
Genre: Autobiography

What the book is about. Wings of Fire is the autobiography of the aerospace engineer who became India's eleventh President. It follows him from Rameswaram, where his father ferried pilgrims and the family lived in modest circumstances, through his engineering education at MIT Madras, to his work at ISRO on the SLV-3 and at DRDO on the missile programme. It closes before his presidency, so it is the record of a working scientist rather than of a public figure.

I am a student of the five-year B.L.S. LL.B. course at ____ Law College, Mumbai, and my coursework in Legal Method, Legal Language and Legal Writing has given me a working grounding in legal research, drafting and case analysis. I am familiar with SCC Online and Manupatra, can prepare case briefs and indexes, and have assisted in the compilation of paper books during a previous internship. I have taken part in two moot court competitions and served on my college's Moot Court Committee.

I am particularly interested in your firm's civil and commercial litigation practice. If appointed, I would be glad to take up research, drafting under supervision, filing, court attendance with your juniors, and the maintenance of case diaries. I am available to join at your convenience and am willing to work outside ordinary hours when a matter requires it.

My bio-data is enclosed for your reference. I would welcome the opportunity of an interview at a time convenient to you.

Thanking you,

Yours faithfully,
Aditi Sharma

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

Place: Mumbai
Date: 28 January 2025 Aditi Sharma

The position is as follows. Supply, which is scheduled from 6.00 a.m. to 8.00 a.m., has for the last six weeks been available only from about 6.20 a.m. to 7.00 a.m., and on nine days in that period there was no supply at all. The pressure is so low that water does not reach the upper floors, and residents of the third and fourth floors have been carrying water up by hand. Households have been compelled to buy tanker water at ₹1,200 a load, which is beyond the means of many families here.

The consequences. Approximately 120 families are affected. Elderly residents and young children are the worst placed, and there is a real risk to health where water has to be stored for long periods in open vessels.

Steps already taken. Complaint No. GN/2024/1183 was lodged at the ward office on 12 December 2024, and a reminder was given by telephone on 6 January 2025. No inspection has taken place and no reply has been received.

I therefore request that:

It has to be remembered that merely giving some kind of occupation to a large number of people does not ultimately increase employment or lessen unemployment. Employment comes from newer and more effective means of wealth production.

The whole experience and history of past two hundred years shows that it comes through the growth of technological methods. We cannot effectively deal with problem of unemployment without technological progress.

2. The argument was reduced to its chain. The passage is a single line of reasoning in four links: unemployment is serious; merely providing occupations does not cure it; employment follows wealth, and wealth follows technology; therefore our poverty is backwardness in science and technology, and remedying it produces wealth and employment together.

3. Repetitions were removed. "Every country which boasts of full employment today is the country which is technologically advanced. Every country which is not technologically advanced had unemployment or under-employment" states one contrast twice, so it becomes a single clause.

4. It is in the third person, in one paragraph, in my own words, and it introduces nothing that is not in the original.

About our Chief Guest. Justice Deshpande was enrolled at the Bar in 1988 and practised for over two decades on the Original Side of this Court, chiefly in constitutional and commercial matters. He was elevated to the Bench in 2012. He has served on the committee for legal aid in this district, and his judgments in service and environmental matters are studied in our own classrooms. For our participants, he needs no introduction: several of you have cited him this week.

Why today matters. A moot court is the closest a student comes to the real thing before the real thing arrives. In these rooms today you will do what practice demands: read a record, find the law, choose your best three points, and then defend them against a Bench that will interrupt you. Two teams will win the trophy. Everyone who argues will leave knowing something about advocacy that no lecture can teach.

Our thanks. To our Principal for her constant encouragement, to the faculty advisers who framed the moot problem, to the judges who have given their time, and to the members of the Committee who have worked through the last three weeks: thank you.

Ambedkar took the three as a single principle, and said so plainly in his closing address to the Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1949. Liberty without equality gives the strong the freedom to dominate the weak. Equality without liberty kills individual initiative. And neither survives without fraternity, which he described as the sense of a common brotherhood among Indians, and which he treated as the real meaning of democracy. He traced the three not to the French Revolution but, as he said, to the teachings of the Buddha.

2. The annihilation of caste.

This is the requisite on which all the others depend. Caste, he argued in Annihilation of Caste (1936), is not a division of labour but a division of labourers, arranged in an ascending order of reverence and a descending order of contempt. It prevents the formation of a society at all, because a society requires shared endeavour and communicated experience, and caste forbids both. He was equally clear that reform of caste practices would not do: what is required is the destruction of the belief in the sanctity of the shastras that sustain it.

3. Social and economic democracy, not merely political democracy.

Quoting the historian Grote, he warned that constitutional morality is "not a natural sentiment" and has to be cultivated: a people must learn to work institutions rather than circumvent them. He added the famous caution that a constitution is only as good as those who work it. "However good a Constitution may be, if those who are implementing it are not good, it will prove to be bad."

6. The abandonment of unconstitutional methods, and of hero-worship.

In the same address he laid down three cautions. First, abandon the "grammar of anarchy", the methods of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha, which were justified against a foreign ruler and are not justified once constitutional means exist. Second, do not lay liberties at the feet of a great man: quoting John Stuart Mill, he said that bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul, but in politics it is "a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship". Third, be content with nothing less than social and economic democracy.

7. Education, organisation and agitation.

How the requisites entered the Constitution

Ambedkar's requisites are not merely exhortations; he wrote as many of them as he could into enforceable law. The Preamble names justice, liberty, equality and fraternity in that order. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law. Article 15 prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth. Article 16 guarantees equality of opportunity in public employment. Article 17 abolishes untouchability in terms, the only social practice the Constitution names and abolishes outright. And Article 32, the right to move the Supreme Court for the enforcement of these rights, he called "the very soul of the Constitution and the very heart of it".

The facts of the case

In John Grisham's A Time to Kill, set in Clanton, Ford County, Mississippi, Carl Lee Hailey's ten-year-old daughter Tonya is brutally attacked and left for dead by two men, who are arrested and brought to the county courthouse. Convinced that an all-white jury will not convict them, and knowing of a recent local case in which such men went free, Carl Lee shoots them in the courthouse stairwell as they are being taken to a hearing, and wounds a deputy in doing so. He is charged with capital murder and faces the gas chamber. He asks Jake Brigance, a young white lawyer who had previously defended his brother, to take his defence.

How Jake helps him obtain justice

1. He takes the case at all.

The District Attorney, Rufus Buckley, is pursuing the case for its political value. Jake advises his client fully and follows his decision to go to trial rather than plead, which is the correct relationship between lawyer and client: the lawyer advises, the client decides.

4. He fights the pre-trial battles that decide the trial.

He applies for a change of venue, arguing that a fair jury cannot be found in Ford County, and although Judge Omar Noose refuses it, the application preserves the point. He works on the composition of the jury, and it is through the jury list that the defence's slender chance survives. Grisham spends as much of the novel on these preliminaries as on the trial itself, and deliberately: most cases are decided before the opening statement.

5. He assembles a defence team out of nothing.

He is opposed by the resources of the State. Against them he brings in Lucien Wilbanks, his disbarred former partner, whose knowledge of the county and of Judge Noose is worth more than any textbook; Harry Rex Vonner, a ruthless divorce lawyer who does the investigative work; and Ellen Roark, a law student who researches the insanity defence and the case law. He also secures Dr W. T. Bass as the psychiatric expert.

• a trial rather than a lynching or a political conviction;
• a jury that decides on its own conscience rather than on the county's expectations;
• and an acquittal on a recognised legal ground.

Whether the verdict is legally sound is left open, and deliberately. On the evidence, Carl Lee planned the shooting, waited, and knew exactly what he was doing. The insanity verdict is a legal fiction that the jury adopts because it is the only door the law leaves open to the result they think just. That gap between the verdict the jury wants and the reasons the law permits is precisely what the novel is about.

Conclusion

Jake Brigance helps Carl Lee Hailey by supplying the four things the system assumes and does not guarantee: a lawyer willing to appear, a coherent legal theory, the work to sustain it, and an advocate able to make twelve people from that community see the case through the eyes of the man in the dock. The verdict comes from the jury; the possibility of that verdict comes from Jake.

1. He is not called by his name

The most economical evidence is the naming. Throughout the scene Shylock is addressed and referred to as "the Jew" far more often than as Shylock. Portia's most famous line in the scene is a question: "Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?" One party is identified by his occupation, the other by his religion. Even the court's own language, "the Jew shall have all justice", places him outside the community whose justice is being administered.

2. The Duke's opening speech

Before a word of the case is heard, the Duke tells the court that Antonio is "a poor man" answering "a stony adversary, an inhuman wretch, uncapable of pity, void and empty from any dram of mercy". This is the presiding judge, before evidence, describing one of the parties as outside humanity. Whatever else follows, the tribunal has announced its view of the defendant before opening the case.

5. The conversion

The judgment is the point at which the attitude passes from language into law. Having lost the bond, Shylock is convicted under the alien statute of seeking a citizen's life. Half his goods go to Antonio, half to the State; and Antonio's "mercy" is that he will hold his half in trust for Lorenzo and Jessica, provided that Shylock "presently become a Christian". Shylock answers with four words, "I am content", and leaves the stage saying that he is not well. He does not appear again in the play. A court has ordered a man to change his religion as a condition of keeping his life, and the scene treats this as clemency.

6. What Shakespeare does with the attitude

Two things must be said, and an answer that says only one of them is incomplete.

First, the play gives the attitude to nearly everyone. Antonio has, on Shylock's uncontradicted account, spat on his gaberdine, called him dog, and "voided his rheum" upon his beard in the Rialto, and when Shylock reminds him of it Antonio does not deny it but says he is "as like to call thee so again". This is not a lapse by a minor character; it is the merchant of the title, and it is offered in the play's own terms as ordinary.

The bond itself was always unenforceable: a contract to take a pound of a man's flesh is void as contrary to public policy, and no court needed a trick about blood to say so. Portia does not decide it on that ground. She lets the case run to the point where Antonio's shirt is open and the knife is ready, and only then produces the verbal reservation. The trial reaches a right result by a method that would not survive examination in any modern court.

The case

Bardell against Pickwick is the action for breach of promise of marriage tried in the Court of Common Pleas in Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers. Mrs Martha Bardell, a widow and Mr Pickwick's landlady in Goswell Street, sues him for £1,500, alleging that he promised to marry her and broke his promise. Mr Pickwick had in fact been telling her, clumsily and at length, that he intended to engage a manservant, Sam Weller; she understood him to be proposing marriage and fainted into his arms, in which posture his three friends discovered him. On that misunderstanding the attorneys Dodson and Fogg build an action.

The parties and the practitioners

3. Winkle, Tupman and Snodgrass, the defendant's own friends, subpoenaed by the plaintiff, who confirm only that they found Mrs Bardell in Mr Pickwick's arms. Winkle is reduced to helplessness in cross-examination and does his friend great harm.

4. Sam Weller, called for the defence, who is unshakeable, funny, and no use at all, since he can prove nothing about the conversation. His "I'd have wished to have seen more" of the affair remains a refusal to invent what he did not see.

Critical examination

1. The action was manufactured, not discovered. Dodson and Fogg take the case on speculation, meaning that Mrs Bardell pays nothing unless she wins. They tell Mr Pickwick so with complete candour when he calls at their office in indignation, and the reader is left to notice that a system permitting such arrangements without any filter for merit will produce actions like this one.

2. Advocacy replaces evidence. Serjeant Buzfuz's opening is a masterpiece of a certain kind: a widow left desolate, a home broken up, "chops and tomato sauce" as the language of a deliberate seducer. There is no evidence of a promise at all, and the speech is designed to make the jury forget that they are being asked for one.

6. The verdict and what follows. The jury finds for the plaintiff with £750 damages. Mr Pickwick refuses on principle to pay a farthing of costs to Dodson and Fogg, and is committed to the Fleet Prison for it. There he finds Mrs Bardell herself, imprisoned at the suit of the same attorneys for their costs when the damages could not be recovered from him. The lawyers are the only parties who profit.

What Dickens is attacking

Not the law of breach of promise as such, but a legal culture: attorneys who treat litigation as a trade in other people's misfortunes; advocates paid to produce feeling rather than proof; a bench that presides without attending; a procedure in which an honest man cannot make himself understood; and a costs regime that imprisons the loser, and then the winner. Dickens had been a court reporter in Doctors' Commons and the Commons Chamber, and the accuracy of the detail is the reason the satire bites.

The novel and its protagonist

Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) is set in the small Mississippi River town of Dawson's Landing. David Wilson, a young lawyer newly arrived from New York, is nicknamed "Pudd'nhead" after a remark about a barking dog which the town takes for foolishness, and the name destroys his practice for more than twenty years. He supports himself by surveying and accounting, and pursues an eccentric hobby: he takes impressions of the fingers of everyone in town on glass slides, dates them, and keeps them.

The two plots the fingerprints join

1. The switch. Roxana (Roxy), a slave who is one-sixteenth black and appears white, fears her infant son will be sold down the river. Her master's child and her own are born within weeks of each other and are indistinguishable. She exchanges the two babies in the cradle. Her son is raised as Tom Driscoll, heir to the family; the true heir is raised as the slave Chambers. No one ever suspects.

3. He demonstrates the science before he applies it. Rather than assert it, Wilson has members of the jury and the court make prints there and then, and identifies them from his slides. He establishes the reliability of the method in front of the tribunal before asking it to convict anybody on the strength of it.

4. He compares the print on the knife with the twins' prints. They do not match, and the twins are cleared.

5. He then compares it with his collection, and finds that it matches the prints of Tom Driscoll, taken years before. The murderer is in the courtroom.

6. The second discovery. Comparing the childhood slides, Wilson finds that the prints of the infant labelled "Tom" do not match the prints of the man now called Tom, but match those of "Chambers", and the reverse. He announces to the court that the man in the dock's clothes is a slave and an impostor, and that the man who has been treated as a slave for twenty-three years is the true heir. Hence his cry, "It's so! Heaven, what a revelation! And for twenty-three years no man has ever suspected it!" Tom confesses; the true heir is restored, unfitted by his upbringing for the place he inherits.

5. It rehabilitates the man who kept it. Wilson is ridiculed for twenty years for the hobby that finally makes him, in the town's phrase, no pudd'nhead at all; he is elected mayor. Twain's joke is that the community's judgment of Wilson was formed exactly as its judgment of Tom and Chambers was, on appearances, and was wrong for exactly as long.

Twain's position in the history of the subject

The novel appeared in 1894, at the moment the science was being established. Sir Francis Galton's Finger Prints was published in 1892; Juan Vucetich made the first identification of a murderer by fingerprint in Argentina in the same year; and the Henry Classification System, developed at Calcutta by Sir Edward Henry with Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose, was adopted in Bengal in 1897 and by Scotland Yard in 1901. Twain was therefore writing about a technique that was not yet routine evidence in any court, and the courtroom scene is fiction running slightly ahead of practice. In India the method now has statutory footing under the Identification of Prisoners Act, 1920, replaced by the Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act, 2022, and expert opinion on it is admissible under Section 45 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 (now Section 39 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023).