BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 1 English 1 February 2026 - 75/25 Question Paper with Solutions

The speaker is Serjeant Buzfuz, counsel for the plaintiff Mrs Martha Bardell, addressing the jury in his closing speech in the case of Bardell against Pickwick, from Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers.

The damages demanded were £1,500, which Buzfuz claims as compensation for his client's alleged breach of promise of marriage by Mr Samuel Pickwick.

The revelation is that the two young men have been living under each other's names. The child brought up as Tom Driscoll, heir to the Driscoll family, is in truth Valet de Chambre, the slave woman's son; and the boy raised in slavery as "Chambers" is the real Tom Driscoll. David "Pudd'nhead" Wilson discovers this from his fingerprint records.

The truth was hidden by Roxy, Valet de Chambre's mother, a slave in the Driscoll household, who exchanged the two infants in the cradle when they were a few months old so that her own son would grow up free.

The writer is George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), and the text is the novel Adam Bede (1859).

The lines come from the trial and sentencing of Hetty Sorrel, the young dairymaid convicted of the concealment and death of her newborn child. The cry that breaks across the judge's formal words of sentence comes from Adam Bede, the carpenter who had loved her and who is in the courtroom.

Answer: Soapy asked (him) whether he did not figure out that he might have had something to do with it.

An equally acceptable form: Soapy enquired if he did not think that he (Soapy) might have had something to do with it.

The changes made, and why:

Answer: Ram gave a smart answer, didn't he?

The rule applied: a positive statement takes a negative tag. The main verb is gave, the past tense of give, which is a full verb with no auxiliary of its own, so the tag supplies the auxiliary did; did + not contracts to didn't; and the subject Ram becomes the pronoun he.

A. Oral communication

Communication by the spoken word, face to face or through a medium.

Its forms, with examples: conversation and discussion; interviews; meetings and conferences; speeches and presentations; telephone calls and video calls; and for a law student most importantly oral arguments in court, client counselling and cross-examination.

Merits: it is fast; it allows immediate feedback and clarification; it carries tone, emphasis and body language, which written words cannot; and it is personal and persuasive.

Demerits: it leaves no record; it is unsuitable for long or complex matter; it can be denied or misremembered; and it is affected by the speaker's nervousness or accent.

B. Written communication

Communication by the written or printed word.

Its forms, with examples: letters and applications; notices, circulars and memoranda; reports; emails and messages; and in law, pleadings, contracts, affidavits, legal notices, opinions and judgments.

Who he is

Lomax Harder is the central character of Arnold Bennett's short story "Murder!" He is a poet: cultivated, sensitive, softly spoken, physically unimpressive, a man of the study rather than of the world. He is in love with Emily, and it is that attachment which sets the story moving, because Emily is bound to John Franting.

His qualities

1. Refined and intellectual. Harder belongs to the world of books and feeling. Everything about his manner suggests a man incapable of violence, and Bennett establishes this carefully so that what follows will be a shock.

2. Deeply, quietly emotional. His love for Emily is genuine and his hatred of Franting is not hot temper but a settled, controlled loathing of a man he regards as a brute.

His significance in the story

Harder exists to unsettle a comfortable assumption: that violence belongs to violent-looking people. Bennett's title is blunt for the same reason. The story asks the reader to watch a gentle, educated man commit a premeditated killing and then to notice how nearly the world lets him pass, because he does not look the part. The detective Dr Austin Bond is brought in precisely because the obvious methods fail against a man nobody suspects.

3. Comically, through a chain of failed attempts. Soapy tries repeatedly to get himself arrested: dining without money, breaking a shop window, creating a disturbance, taking an umbrella, behaving offensively in the street. Every attempt fails. The restaurant throws him out rather than call the police, the officer refuses to believe the window-breaker would linger, the umbrella's owner had stolen it himself.

4. Through irony, which is O. Henry's characteristic instrument. The law is unavailable exactly when it is wanted. The city that arrests men for nothing will not arrest this man for anything.

5. Finally, with sudden seriousness. Standing outside a quiet church, Soapy hears the organ playing an anthem he knew as a boy. The music recalls his mother, roses, ambitions, clean thoughts and collars. He resolves in that moment to reclaim his life, find work and become a man again.

6. And then the sting. At the very instant of his reformation, a policeman arrests him for loitering, and the magistrate sends him to Blackwell's Island for three months. He is punished for the one moment in the story in which he intended no wrong.

2. It destroys liberty and constitutional government. Fascism concentrates all power in one leader and abolishes the checks that protect the individual against the State. Ambedkar, who would go on to chair the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution, regarded limits on power as the whole purpose of a constitution.

3. It replaces reason with force. Ambedkar was a rationalist who believed political questions must be settled by argument, evidence and consent. Fascism settles them by violence and propaganda.

4. It is hostile to fraternity. Ambedkar's trinity was liberty, equality and fraternity, and he regarded fraternity as the hardest and most necessary of the three. An ideology that defines a nation by whom it excludes makes fraternity impossible.

5. It is incompatible with democracy as he understood it. For Ambedkar democracy was not merely majority rule but "a mode of associated living", a form of society in which people treat one another as equals. A dictatorship cannot produce that however efficient it appears.

I write in response to your advertisement in The Times of India dated 15 February 2026 for the post of Legal Assistant, and I wish to offer myself as a candidate for it.

I am a student of the five-year B.L.S. LL.B. course at ____ Law College, Mumbai, presently in the first year. My coursework in Legal Language, Legal Method and Economics has given me a working grounding in legal drafting, research and case analysis. I have interned with Adv. ____ at the Bombay High Court, where I assisted in preparing case briefs, indexing paper books and conducting research on SCC Online and Manupatra. I am comfortable with drafting notices, plaints and written statements under supervision, and I have participated in two intra-collegiate moot court competitions.

I am confident that I can discharge the duties of the post with diligence, and I would welcome the opportunity to appear for an interview at your convenience. My resume is enclosed for your kind consideration.

Thanking you,

Yours faithfully,
Rahul Deshmukh

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

Place: Mumbai
Date: 21 February 2026 Rahul Deshmukh

I am a residential consumer of your division at the above address, holding Consumer No. 1234567890. I write to bring to your notice a serious error in the electricity bill issued to me for the month of February 2026.

The bill in question, dated 12 February 2026, is for ₹9,840 against a consumption shown as 1,180 units. My average monthly consumption over the preceding twelve months has been between 180 and 220 units, and my bills have ranged between ₹1,400 and ₹1,800. There has been no addition of any appliance in my household, and the flat remained locked for eleven days during the billing period. The meter reading recorded on the bill also does not agree with the present reading on the meter, which I have photographed and noted as 42,310 units.

It appears that the reading has either been taken incorrectly or estimated, or that the meter is defective. I therefore request you kindly to (i) arrange for a re-inspection of the meter and a fresh reading, (ii) revise the bill in accordance with the corrected reading, and (iii) hold the disconnection notice in abeyance until the dispute is resolved.

Men will educate one another, will introduce better ways of and habit of friendly co-operation and will in the long run create a new society which will give the best possible opportunity of good life to all. A believer in democracy has faith in human nature, in the goodwill and political ability of the common man.

But, uneducated people with no experience of self-government are quite incapable of suddenly making a success of democracy. History shows that subtle democracy is a slow growth.

The people must have a long experience of self-government and responsibility in many walks of life. They learn the qualities of tolerance, co-operation and judgement which are essential to be a good citizen of a democracy.

3. Repetitions were removed. "Goodwill and common sense", "faith in human nature, in the goodwill and political ability of the common man" and "believer in democracy" all repeat one idea, so they are compressed into a single clause.

4. It is written in the third person and in the writer's own words, in one connected paragraph, in reported form, and it introduces nothing that is not in the original.

A moot court is where a law student first learns that a good argument is not the loudest one. It is where we discover the distance between knowing a proposition of law and standing up to defend it against a bench that is not persuaded. Today thirty-two teams from our college will argue a problem on constitutional law before benches of practising advocates and judges, and whatever the results, every participant will leave a better lawyer than they arrived.

It is therefore a particular honour to welcome our Chief Guest, Honourable Justice ____ , whose career has spanned four decades at the Bar and on the Bench. Known for judgments on ____ that are studied in classrooms such as ours, and for a lifelong insistence that access to justice must be real and not merely formal, Justice ____ represents precisely what this competition hopes to teach: that advocacy is a public trust and not a performance. That such a distinguished jurist has taken time from a demanding schedule to be with us today is an encouragement to every student in this hall.

The significance is procedural, not merely rude: the presiding judge has characterised the defendant's character before the hearing begins. Whatever the merits, the tribunal is not neutral.

2. The law is applied to him with a strictness applied to no one else

Shylock's bond is valid. Antonio signed it freely, the consideration was real, and the penalty was stated. Shylock's argument is unanswerable on its own terms, and he makes it himself: if Venice refuses to enforce a lawful bond because of who holds it, then no contract in Venice is safe.

Portia concedes this. She says the bond is forfeit and the law allows the claim. She then defeats it by an interpretation of breathtaking literalism: the bond grants flesh but not blood, and not "one jot" more or less than a pound. That reading is available only because the court chooses to apply it. No commercial contract could survive such a standard, and it is applied here to one litigant only.

5. The other side of the argument

A complete essay must concede what can be said against Shylock. He is offered three times his money and refuses. He whets his knife in open court. He rejects mercy when the Duke asks what mercy he can expect if he renders none. He is, at that point, seeking a man's life over a commercial debt, and Shakespeare does not disguise it.

6. But the play supplies Shylock's own answer

Against that stands the speech Shakespeare gives him, which no merely villainous character would be given: "Hath not a Jew eyes? ... If you prick us, do we not bleed? ... And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" Shylock's argument is that his cruelty is learned, taught to him by the treatment he has received; and Antonio's conduct earlier in the play, spitting on him and calling him a dog, is admitted in the text.

The facts the answer must begin from

A Time to Kill (1989) is John Grisham's first novel, set in Ford County, Mississippi. Carl Lee Hailey, a black millworker, has a ten-year-old daughter, Tonya, who is abducted, raped and left for dead by two white men. Carl Lee, convinced that a local jury will not convict them, shoots both men in the courthouse as they are being brought from a hearing, and is charged with capital murder.

Jake Brigance is the young white lawyer of the town who agrees to defend him. The question is how he secures justice for a client whose act is undisputed.

1. He takes the case at all

This is the first and largest contribution. Carl Lee is poor, the fee is negligible, the case is unwinnable on its face, and defending him will cost Jake his safety, his practice and nearly his marriage. Jake takes it because Carl Lee had asked him beforehand, in effect, what he would do if it were his own daughter, and Jake understood the answer. A defendant with no lawyer willing to fight has no rights at all, and Jake supplies that first.

4. He fights the procedural battles

He moves for a change of venue, arguing that no impartial jury can be found in a county saturated with the case; the motion is refused. He contests the composition of the jury and works, within the limits of the selection process, to seat jurors capable of hearing him. He resists the prosecution's attempts to try the case in the newspapers. District Attorney Rufus Buckley, with his eye on higher office, is a formidable and politically motivated opponent throughout.

5. He withstands intimidation without abandoning his client

The trial attracts the Ku Klux Klan, which mounts a campaign of terror: marches, threats to jurors, an attempt on Jake's life, and the burning of his house. His secretary's husband is attacked and the National Guard is deployed to keep order in the town. Jake sends his wife and daughter away and continues. Justice for Carl Lee depended on his lawyer simply not stopping, and this is the point at which many advocates in life, and most in fiction, would have withdrawn.

What a book review must contain

A review is not a summary. It must give the book's particulars, an account of its content, an assessment of its merits and limitations, and a personal statement of why it mattered to you. For 13 marks, all four are required.

Model review

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

Introduction. Wings of Fire is the autobiography of Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, aerospace scientist and eleventh President of India. It covers the first six decades of his life, from a boat-builder's family in Rameswaram to the leadership of India's missile programme, and it stops deliberately before his presidency.

Its limitations. The book is reticent about Kalam's private life almost to a fault, and it says little about the political controversies surrounding the weapons programmes he led. A reader looking for a critical account of India's nuclear policy will not find it here.

Why it inspired me. I read it in the year I was deciding whether to study law. What stayed with me was not the science but a single organising idea: that preparation is the whole of opportunity, and that the years in which nothing seems to be happening are the years the work is actually done. Kalam's account of failing to become a pilot, and of understanding only decades later what that failure had freed him to do, changed how I read setbacks. For a law student facing five years of reading before the first real brief, that is a more useful lesson than any amount of encouragement.

Recommendation. I would recommend it to any student, and particularly to a first-generation learner. It is short, unpretentious and entirely free of self-congratulation.

The documentary evidence consists of two notes from Mr Pickwick to Mrs Bardell. One says "Dear Mrs B., Chops and Tomata sauce. Yours, Pickwick." The other concerns a warming pan and asks her not to trouble about it. Buzfuz presents these to the jury as coded declarations of love, arguing that the very ordinariness of the language proves a guilty design to conceal.

This is the trial's central absurdity, and the point Dickens is making: an advocate skilled enough can extract any meaning from any document, and a jury may accept it.

2. Buzfuz's advocacy is rhetoric substituting for proof

His opening is a performance. He describes the widow's loneliness, the fatherless boy, the "heavy damages" that are the only recompense available. He works on sympathy because he has nothing else. He asks the jury not what was promised but what a widow deserves.

His treatment of the witnesses is worse. Mrs Cluppins admits she overheard the conversation by standing outside a partly open door, which is to say she was eavesdropping, and her evidence is received without demur. Winkle, a defence-minded witness, is so thoroughly rattled in cross-examination that he damages his own friend's case.

5. The verdict, and what follows

The jury finds for the plaintiff and awards £750. Mr Pickwick, who has done nothing, refuses on principle to pay a penny of damages or costs, saying he would sooner spend the rest of his life in a debtor's prison. He is committed to the Fleet, where he sees the real consequences of the debt laws on people far poorer than himself. He is released only when Mrs Bardell, unable to pay her own lawyers Dodson and Fogg, is herself imprisoned, and Mr Pickwick pays her costs to free her.

Conclusion

The trial is a comic set-piece and a serious indictment at once. Every participant behaves according to the rules, and the outcome is a fraud. The attorneys got up a case they knew to be worthless because it was profitable; counsel argued it with skill and no scruple; the judge did not intervene; the jury was moved by sentiment; and an innocent man went to prison while the nominal winner ended there too. Only Dodson and Fogg profit.

The real culprit is Tom Driscoll, the Judge's nephew and heir, a gambler and thief who had entered the house to steal and who is in truth Valet de Chambre, the son of the slave Roxy, exchanged in the cradle for the real heir twenty-three years earlier.

The evidence Wilson presents

1. The fingerprints on the knife handle. This is the foundation. Wilson establishes that the bloodied knife carries clear prints, and that those prints belong neither to Luigi nor to Angelo. That alone destroys the case against his clients.

2. The proposition that fingerprints are unique and unchanging. Before his identification can mean anything, Wilson must persuade a sceptical court of the science itself. He explains that every human being carries "physiological autographs" on the fingers, that no two persons have ever been found to share them, and that they do not alter from the cradle to the grave. He demonstrates this in open court by taking prints from members of the jury and audience and identifying them without seeing whose they are.

The outcome

The twins are acquitted and freed. Tom is convicted. The real heir is restored to the Driscoll name and estate, though Twain notes bleakly that he is fitted for neither, having been raised in slavery and being unable to enter the society that now claims him. Tom, once identified as a slave and therefore as property, is sold down the river by the estate's creditors, because as a chattel his value belongs to them rather than to the criminal law. Wilson, vindicated at last, is elected mayor.

Conclusion

Wilson's evidence is remarkable because it is entirely physical and objective in a town that has decided everything by rumour, appearance and social standing for twenty-three years. He does not out-argue the prosecution; he produces a fact that argument cannot touch. And the same evidence answers two questions at once: who killed the Judge, and who these two young men actually are.