BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 1 English 1 2022-23 - ATKT 60/40 Question Paper with Solutions

The vagabond is Joseph Andrews, and the text is Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (Book IV, Chapter II). The speaker is Lady Booby, and she is speaking to Parson Abraham Adams.

Joseph is her former footman, dismissed after he refused her, and he now intends to marry Fanny Goodwill and settle in her parish. Adams has published the banns; she has ordered him to publish them no more; and when he answers that he is willing to surcease if anyone assigns a proper reason, this sentence is the reason she gives.

The words were uttered by the judge at the Stoniton assizes, passing sentence on Hester "Hetty" Sorrel in George Eliot's Adam Bede (Chapter XLIII, "The Verdict").

The crime is child murder — the death and concealment of her newborn infant. The jury had returned a verdict of "Guilty", and the judge began, "Hester Sorrel...", and passed the sentence of death that the law then required for murder.

The speaker is Socrates, in Plato's Apology, addressing the court immediately after the jury had voted to convict him, at Athens in 399 B.C.

He was condemned on two charges: that he did not acknowledge the gods the city acknowledged and introduced new divinities of his own, and that he corrupted the youth of Athens. His accusers were Meletus, Anytus and Lycon.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi wanted to avoid violence, and the quotation is from his written statement at the Great Trial, before Judge C. N. Broomfield at Ahmedabad on 18 March 1922, where he was charged under Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code with exciting disaffection towards the Government.

The sentence continues: "Non-violence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed."

The writer is Lord Denning, and the quotation is from the prescribed Lord Denning extract, in his discussion of how courts should read documents.

The "similar controversy" is the long argument between two schools of construction: those who hold that a document must be given the strict and technical meaning the law has attached to its words, and those who hold that it should be read in the sense its readers would naturally give it. Denning is observing that the dispute which arises over the interpretation of statutes arises in the same form over the interpretation of wills.

Who he is

John Franting is the victim in Arnold Bennett's short story "Murder!", and the man whose character supplies the motive for the crime. He is set in deliberate contrast with Lomax Harder, the mild poet who kills him.

His character

1. Physically formidable. A dozen years earlier he had been perhaps the finest amateur boxer in England, and he bewildered his opponents by being left-handed.

2. Brutal in temperament. A bully in his dealings and in his affections, and it is his treatment of Emily, the woman both men care for, that gives Harder a motive.

3. Coarse and insensitive. Where Harder is refined and inward, Franting is loud, worldly and blunt, with no capacity to understand a man like him.

4. Domineering, and used to winning. He has always got his way by force of body and force of manner, and has never had to find another method.

What he wanted before it

Soapy is the homeless man of O. Henry's story. Winter is coming to Madison Square and he needs three months' lodging. He refuses the shelters and missions, where a bed is paid for with "humiliation of the spirit", and settles on Blackwell's Island, which asks nothing of his self-respect. His whole plan is to get himself arrested, and every attempt fails: he dines without money and is thrown out, breaks a window and is not believed because he did not run, behaves offensively to a woman who turns out to be willing, shouts and sings and is taken for a college boy, takes an umbrella from a man who had taken it himself.

The change

Outside an old church on a quiet street he hears an organist practising, and through the window comes an anthem he had known as a boy, when his life had mothers and roses and ambitions and friends and clean thoughts and clean collars.

What it means

1. It is genuine, not a device. O. Henry gives it the fullest and most serious writing in the story. 2. It is produced by memory, not by punishment. Neither the police nor the missions could reach him; a tune he knew as a child did it in a moment. The story sets internal reform against external coercion and finds the first far the stronger. 3. It comes too late by minutes. The arrest is not punishment for the day's offences, of which the officer knows nothing; it is punishment for standing still, in shabby clothes, outside a church at night. 4. It leaves the sharper question open. Three months will take Soapy past the winter, and past the one moment in the story when he wanted to change. O. Henry does not tell us whether the resolve survives it.

The decision below

Lawton J dealt with them at once for contempt in the face of the court and sentenced eleven of them to three months' imprisonment, with fines for others. He acted immediately, which is exactly what the summary power exists for.

The appeal

Lord Denning MR upheld the finding of contempt in the strongest terms: "The course of justice must not be deflected or interfered with. Those who strike at it strike at the very foundations of our society."

But he reduced the punishment. Counsel told the Court of Appeal that the students had apologised and given assurances as to their future conduct. On that footing Denning held that the object of the sentence had already been achieved: it is imposed to secure that the interruption stops, not to be vindictive. Those who apologised, having spent about a week in prison, were released and bound over to be of good behaviour; the position of those who did not was not disturbed.

What a ward of court is

A ward of court is a child whose custody and upbringing have been placed under the protection of the court, so that no important step in the child's life may be taken without the court's leave. Because the subject matter is a child's welfare, wardship proceedings are heard in private, and that fact is the whole of this case.

The case

The case is discussed by Lord Denning in the prescribed extract on contempt of court. A young man who had been in trouble with the law was permitted, on the advice of a social worker, to visit a girl who was a ward of court and was living in a hostel. A newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, published a report of the matter under a heading to the effect that a "jailed lover should visit hostel girl."

The Official Solicitor, who acts for the ward, took the view that the report disclosed some of the proceedings which had taken place in private, and contempt proceedings were brought against the newspaper. The judge held that it was a contempt of court.

The tension

The case sits on the fault line that runs through the whole Denning extract: the administration of justice on one side and freedom of the press on the other. A report about how public authorities deal with a vulnerable girl is a matter of legitimate public interest; and the same report, if it identifies her and repeats what was said in a private hearing, injures the person the proceedings existed to protect.

He was a casual hand employed by solicitors for defence, just as a clerk at pound 5 a day, knowing no law. A case dragged on and on.

He got exceedingly bored. He made a plan to liven it up." i) Which case is being referred to in the above passage?

ii) Give a brief account of the case.

(i) The case

Balogh v St Albans Crown Court [1975] QB 73, known as the laughing gas case, decided by the Court of Appeal with Lord Denning MR presiding. The passage quoted is the opening of Denning's own judgment, and it is one of the contempt cases in the prescribed extract.

• There was no urgency. The cylinder had been seized and the plan had failed; Balogh could perfectly well have been prosecuted in the ordinary way for the theft or an attempt. The summary power is for occasions when it is urgent and imperative to act immediately.
• The sentence was in any event excessive. He had spent 14 days in prison and had apologised, and Denning held that was enough "to purge his contempt, if contempt it was."

(ii) A brief account

1. The background. Honig, a landlord, let flats in a tenement house. He forcibly evicted a tenant named Harrand: while the Harrands were out for the day he entered the flat, piled their furniture into one room, installed somebody else and padlocked the doors against them. Harrand sued him for trespass.

2. The witness. Chapman, another tenant in the same house, was subpoenaed to give evidence in Harrand's action, and gave it against the landlord.

3. The retaliation. On the day after Chapman gave his evidence, Honig served him with a notice to quit his own flat. The notice was valid on its face; the motive for it was plainly revenge.

4. Chapman sued. He claimed damages, contending that serving a notice to quit in order to punish a man for giving evidence is a civil wrong as well as a contempt of court.

The case for calling them a bane. Falsehood travels faster than correction, and lynchings in India have followed forwarded rumours. They are engineered to be habit-forming, and the effect on the sleep and attention of the young is measurable. They expose children to harassment, and adults to fraud. They collect and sell personal data. Their recommendation systems reward outrage, which hardens opinion into hostility.

The legal position. The Information Technology Act, 2000, section 79 and the Intermediary Guidelines Rules, 2021 govern platform liability and due diligence; section 66D covers cheating by personation; the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 governs personal data. In Shreya Singhal (2015) the Supreme Court struck down section 66A for vagueness, holding that online speech enjoys the same protection as any other.

Conclusion. They are a powerful instrument and a poor master. Regulate the platform, educate the user, and the boon outweighs the bane.

The reality. The gap in school enrolment has closed almost entirely, and women now outnumber men in many university courses, including law. Reservation of one-third of seats in Panchayats and Municipalities under the 73rd and 74th Amendments has put over a million women into elected office, and the Women's Reservation Act, 2023 extends the principle to the Lok Sabha and the Assemblies. The statute book is substantial: the Domestic Violence Act, 2005, the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013, the daughter's equal coparcenary right under the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005. The courts have matched it, from Vishaka (1997) to Joseph Shine (2018) and Babita Puniya (2020).

4. She refuses to bend the law when asked. Bassanio begs her to "wrest once the law to your authority: to do a great right, do a little wrong", and she answers: "It must not be. There is no power in Venice can alter a decree established", warning that it would stand as a precedent.

5. She awards the forfeit in full. "A pound of that same merchant's flesh is thine; the court awards it, and the law doth give it." Shylock answers, "Most rightful judge!"

6. She lets the case run to the last possible moment, with the bosom bared, the scales ready and the knife whetted, and asks whether a surgeon is at hand.

7. She produces the reservation. "Tarry a little; there is something else." The bond gives flesh and not one drop of blood, and an exact pound must be taken, "nor cut thou less nor more".

8. She produces the alien statute. When Shylock will take the principal after all, she refuses; when he asks only his bare bond, she refuses again; and then invokes the law against an alien who seeks a citizen's life.

9. She takes the ring, still in disguise, as her fee, and afterwards convicts Bassanio of parting with it.

The deeper criticism

She never takes the ground that was available all along. A contract to cut a pound of flesh from a living man is void as contrary to public policy — in Indian terms under Section 23 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872 — and no court needed a trick about blood to say so. She upholds the bond, praises Shylock's insistence on the letter, and lets the case run until a man's shirt is open and a knife is in the air. Superb theatre and very bad law.

Conclusion

Portia is a brilliant advocate impersonating a judge. Her performance saves an innocent man and would be set aside on appeal in any modern system, and Shakespeare, who worked among lawyers at the Inns of Court, is unlikely to have arranged that by accident.

2. The withdrawal of his witnesses. The Misses Clarkson, who would have spoken to a veiled young woman leaving the premises, had been delayed. He rose and said he would probably not need them: "I have other testimony, and better." He explained that he had not discovered the material until late the previous night.

3. The scientific proposition. That the pattern on each finger is different in every human being, never changes from infancy to death, and cannot be forged: a "natal autograph" every person carries and cannot lose.

4. The demonstration. He had members of the jury and officers of the court make prints there and then, mixed them, and identified each from his own dated slides. He proved his instrument to the tribunal before asking it to decide anything by it.

5. The comparison. The print on the knife matched neither twin, and he said, indicating them, "These men are innocent. I have no further concern with them."

6. The identification. The same print matched slides taken years earlier of Tom Driscoll, sitting in the courtroom.

1. It was sprung without notice. Wilson offers a justification for producing it late, which concedes that notice would ordinarily be required. 2. The advocate was his own expert. Counsel cannot be his own witness: there is nobody to cross-examine, and the tribunal cannot separate opinion from advocacy. 3. There was no independent verification. The slides were his own, made, labelled and kept by him — the very thing he himself doubted for half an hour the night before, muttering that the baby's prints did not tally and that he had never labelled anything carelessly in his life. 4. No chain of custody for the knife is anywhere established.

Conclusion

Wilson's evidence is the finest thing in the prescribed texts and would need considerable tidying to be admitted today. Its virtue is that it replaced impressions with a fact the court could verify with its own hands; its vice is that it arrived without notice, from an advocate acting as his own expert, unchecked by anybody. Twain's point survives the criticism: two innocent men were saved, and a town's twenty-three-year error corrected, by one mark nobody could argue with.

2. He fears doing wrong far more than dying

He tells the court he will not abandon his questioning to save his life, because to disobey what he believes right, out of fear, is a certain evil, while death may be no evil at all. Asked whether he is not ashamed of a course of life likely to bring him to an untimely end, his answer is that a man worth anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying, but only whether he is doing right or wrong.

3. He refuses the condition on which he could live

Somebody will say, he observes, "cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city and no one will interfere with you?" His answer is that to do so would be a disobedience to the God who set him this task, and that he cannot hold his tongue — because "the unexamined life is not worth living", and daily discourse about virtue is the greatest good of man. Exile and silence were available to him and he declined both.

4. The argument in the alternative

Death must be one of two things, and both are gains.

6. His conclusion

"No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death." He and his are not neglected by the gods, and his own approaching end has not happened by chance: the time had come when it was better for him to die and be released from trouble. For that reason he is not angry with his accusers, although they did not mean to do him any good.

His closing words: "The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows."

The points he makes

1. The Emergency was declared because of a personal danger, not a national one. On 12 June 1975 the Allahabad High Court, in the judgment of Justice Jagmohanlal Sinha, set aside Mrs Indira Gandhi's election on grounds of corrupt practice; on the same day the Gujarat election results went against her party. The Emergency followed within a fortnight, on 25 June 1975. Chagla's point is that the threat which had actually materialised was to her office, and the justification offered was that the country was in danger — "a conspiracy against her, not the country."

2. She has never admitted that it was wrong. He observes that she has never acknowledged the wrong of promulgating the Emergency and continues to justify it, where genuine contrition would require an apology "in sack cloth and ashes." For Chagla the refusal matters more than the act, because an unrepented wrong is one that may be repeated.

7. He writes as a judge about the destruction of judicial independence, which is what gives the chapter its authority. He is not an opposition politician making a political case; he is a former Chief Justice describing what was done to his own court.

Discussion

Chagla's Epilogue is worth reading as a constitutional argument in the form of a memoir. Its subject is not really Mrs Gandhi. It is the discovery that the machinery of a constitution can be turned against the constitution while every step remains formally regular: an emergency lawfully proclaimed, judges lawfully appointed, amendments lawfully passed, and the result a state in which the courts could no longer protect anybody.

The flatness of his prose is deliberate. He does not denounce; he records, and the record does the work.