BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 1 English 1 2023-24 - ATKT 60/40 Question Paper with Solutions

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

"The greatest beauty in the parish" is Fanny Goodwill, the young woman Joseph Andrews intends to marry. Adams has just told Lady Booby that the couple wished to marry long ago and that he dissuaded them, and she is approving that, sourly, while unable to leave the subject of Fanny's looks alone.

The speaker is Sarah Stone, the widow of Church Lane, Stoniton, giving evidence at the assize trial of Hetty Sorrel in George Eliot's Adam Bede (Chapter XLIII, "The Verdict").

She was angry because Hetty had slipped out of the house with the newborn baby while she was away. Sarah Stone had gone out for about an hour and a half to fetch an experienced woman, being afraid the young mother was feverish; she left the door on the latch and the candle burning; and when she came back both the prisoner and the child were gone. Her anger is the anger of a woman who had taken responsibility for a sick girl and a newborn and found them out on a dark night in her absence.

The speaker is Socrates, in Plato's Apology, addressing the judges who had voted to acquit him, after sentence of death had been passed.

The person not neglected by the gods is the good man, and "his" means his family and his affairs. The sentence immediately before it is the one it depends on: "no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death." Socrates is saying that a good man and everything belonging to him are in the care of the gods, and that his own approaching death is therefore not an accident.

The speaker is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in his written statement at the Great Trial before Judge C. N. Broomfield at Ahmedabad on 18 March 1922, where he was explaining how a loyal supporter of the British connection had become a non-co-operator.

The Rowlatt Act (the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, 1919) allowed the Government to try political cases without a jury and in camera, to hold suspects without trial, and to require a released person to give security, report to the authorities and abstain from political activity. It carried the wartime emergency powers into peacetime, and its effect was to remove ordinary criminal safeguards from anyone the Government chose to call a political offender. It was popularly summed up as "no vakil, no dalil, no appeal" — no lawyer, no argument, no appeal.

The speaker is Lord Denning, in his dissenting judgment in Sydall v Castings Ltd [1967] 1 QB 302, a case discussed in the prescribed Denning extract.

The matter was whether an illegitimate child could take under a benefit fund. A workman named Sydall died, and money was payable under a group life assurance scheme administered by his employers, to be held for his "descendants" and "relations". He left a daughter, Yvette, who was illegitimate. The question was whether those words included her. The majority held that in a legal document such words mean legitimate descendants and legitimate relations only, and that Yvette was therefore excluded. Denning dissented, holding that in the ordinary meaning of the words she was plainly her father's relation and her father's descendant.

Who he is

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

His character

1. Refined and inward. Everything about him suggests a man incapable of violence, and Bennett builds the story on that impression in order to break it.

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

3. Deliberate. He does not lose his head. He goes to a shop, buys a revolver, invents a plausible reason for the purchase, and goes to find Franting. Every step is prepared, which is exactly what puts the act beyond any defence of provocation.

Why he wants to be arrested

Soapy, the homeless man of O. Henry's "The Cop and the Anthem", needs three months' lodging for the New York winter. He refuses the shelters and missions, where a bed is paid for with "humiliation of the spirit" — questions about his private life, a bath, a sermon. Blackwell's Island, the workhouse prison, asks nothing of his self-respect. So his plan is to commit an offence in front of a policeman and be taken up.

The attempts, in order

1. The expensive dinner. He proposes to dine well at a smart restaurant and then announce that he has no money. He never gets past the door: the head waiter's eye falls on his frayed trousers and worn shoes, and he is turned away before he can sit down.

2. The shop window. He picks up a cobblestone and smashes a plate-glass window, then stands still with his hands in his pockets and, when the policeman comes running, tells him he did it. The officer does not believe him, because in his experience men who break windows run away, and he goes off after somebody else.

2. Each fails for a different reason, and the reasons together make the criticism: his appearance turns him away at the door; his honesty makes him unbelievable; a shopkeeper prefers not to involve the police; the complainant will not complain; the same conduct in different clothes is innocent; and the true owner has a guilty conscience of his own.

3. And then he is arrested for nothing. Standing quietly outside a church at the moment he resolves to reform, he is charged with loitering and given three months.

1. There is no privilege for journalists. The only profession that enjoys a privilege from disclosing information to a court is the legal profession, and that privilege belongs to the client, not to the lawyer. A doctor, a priest, a banker, an accountant and a journalist have no legal right to refuse.

2. But the court has a discretion. A judge will respect the confidences that members of such professions receive, and will not compel an answer unless the question is not only relevant but a proper and necessary one in the course of justice. The protection lies in the judge's control of what is asked, not in any right in the witness.

3. The decision is the judge's, not the witness's. That is the heart of it. A witness may say why he objects; he may not decide the objection himself.

Other forms of the same contempt

1. Refusing to be sworn or to affirm. 2. Refusing to produce a document lawfully required. 3. Refusing to answer a particular question after being directed to answer it.

In each case the court may commit the witness until he complies. The punishment is coercive rather than punitive: it lasts as long as the refusal.

The rule

It is a contempt of court to publish material that creates a real risk of prejudicing a trial that has not yet taken place. The principle is that a case must be tried in court, on the evidence, and not in the newspapers, and the rule protects the accused, the parties and the jury alike. It is discussed by Lord Denning in the prescribed extract, and is often called the sub judice rule.

The kinds of publication that offend

1. Asserting that an accused person is guilty before a jury has decided. 2. Publishing his previous convictions, which a jury is not allowed to hear. 3. Publishing a confession, or an account of evidence that may be ruled inadmissible. 4. Photographs, where identification is in issue. 5. Comment on the merits of a pending civil case, which is the point that arose in the Thalidomide litigation. 6. Interviewing or paying witnesses before they give evidence.

The Court of Appeal, with Lord Denning MR, discharged the injunction, holding that the litigation had been dormant for ten years, that the matter was one of great public concern, and that no trial was in prospect that could be prejudiced. The House of Lords restored it. The editor then took the case to Strasbourg, and in The Sunday Times v United Kingdom (1979) the European Court of Human Rights held that the injunction breached the right to freedom of expression under Article 10.

The law that resulted

The Contempt of Court Act 1981 was passed in consequence, and it narrowed the rule in three ways worth naming:

• the strict liability rule applies only to proceedings that are "active";
• there must be a substantial risk of serious prejudice, not any risk at all;
• section 5 protects a discussion in good faith of public affairs where the risk of prejudice is merely incidental.

In India the position is governed by the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971, which defines criminal contempt to include publication that prejudices or interferes with the due course of any judicial proceeding.

(a) The case

Morris v Crown Office [1970] 2 QB 114, known as the Welsh Students case, one of the contempt cases discussed by Lord Denning in the prescribed extract.

(b) A brief account

1. Who they were and what they wanted. A group of students of the Welsh Language Society, most of them from the University College of Wales, were campaigning for the Welsh language, and in particular against broadcasting to Wales being carried out in English rather than in Welsh. They were young, they were sincere, and their cause was a real one.

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

Why it matters

1. It states the principle plainly: a court must be able to protect the administration of justice, and the summary power exists for that purpose alone. 2. It marks the limit of the power: the sentence is a means, not an end, and once the contempt is purged by apology further imprisonment serves nothing. 3. It separates the cause from the method. Denning was notably sympathetic to the students' cause and to their youth, and entirely unsympathetic to the method. A good cause is not a licence to disrupt a court.

2. The article. The Sunday Times, under its editor Harold Evans, published one article about the plight of the families and prepared a second, which would examine how the drug came to be tested and marketed and would criticise the settlement Distillers had offered. A draft was sent to the Attorney-General.

3. The writ. On 12 October 1972 the Attorney-General issued a writ claiming an injunction to restrain publication, on the ground that the article would be a contempt of court, because it prejudged an issue in proceedings that were still pending.

4. The decisions.

• The Divisional Court granted the injunction.
• The Court of Appeal, with Lord Denning MR, discharged it, on the ground that the litigation had been dormant for years, that the matter was one of legitimate and grave public concern, and that no trial was in prospect that could be prejudiced.
• The House of Lords restored it, holding that the article would prejudge the merits and that prejudgment of pending proceedings is itself contempt.

The case for it. First, equality between citizens: rights in family matters presently depend on the religion a person was born into. Second, equality within the family, since it is women whose rights differ most sharply between systems, in maintenance, in inheritance and in the grounds of divorce. Third, certainty: courts spend years construing custom and text where a statute would answer the question. Fourth, the Supreme Court has repeatedly urged it, from Shah Bano (1985) to Sarla Mudgal (1995). Fifth, Goa has had a common civil code since Portuguese rule, and India already has an optional one in the Special Marriage Act, 1954.

Model answer (about 265 words)

The position. Women are roughly half of India's population and a small minority of the people who take its decisions. Reservation is the attempt to close that gap by law rather than by waiting.

What has already been done. The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments (1992) reserved one-third of the seats and of the offices of chairperson in Panchayats and Municipalities for women; many States have since raised it to fifty per cent. Over a million women hold elected local office as a result. The Constitution (106th Amendment) Act, 2023, the Women's Reservation Act, provides for one-third reservation in the Lok Sabha and the State Legislative Assemblies, to take effect after a census and delimitation.

2. The religious and personal conflict

This is the deepest layer, and Shakespeare gives it to Shylock to state. On his own uncontradicted account, Antonio has spat upon his gaberdine, called him dog, and voided his rheum upon his beard on the Rialto. Asked to lend money to such a man, Shylock puts the question: shall he say, "Hath a dog money? Is it possible a cur can lend three thousand ducats?"

Antonio's answer is the most revealing line in the play: "I am as like to call thee so again, to spit on thee again, to spurn thee too." He does not deny it, does not soften, and asks for the loan as to an enemy rather than a friend. The conflict is not a misunderstanding; it is openly acknowledged on both sides.

3. The bond

Shylock proposes what he calls "a merry sport": three thousand ducats for three months, no interest at all, and if the sum is not repaid on the day, a pound of Antonio's fair flesh, to be cut off in what part of his body pleaseth Shylock. Antonio, confident his ships will return a month before the day, agrees over Bassanio's objection. Bassanio, for whom the money is being borrowed, is the only person in the scene who thinks the bond a bad idea.

He grounds his refusal on an oath sworn by his holy Sabbath: "An oath, an oath, I have an oath in heaven." When Portia urges mercy he answers, "My deeds upon my head! I crave the law."

Antonio, meanwhile, has stopped fighting. He tells Bassanio he is "a tainted wether of the flock, meetest for death", asks him not to repent losing a friend who pays his debt, and requests only that he live to tell the tale.

How it ends

Portia, disguised as Balthazar, first confirms the bond entirely, and then finds within it that it gives flesh but not one drop of blood, and that Shylock must take an exact pound or forfeit everything. The conflict then reverses completely. Under the alien statute, which nobody had pleaded, he is convicted of seeking a citizen's life: half his goods to the State, half to Antonio, his life at the Duke's mercy. Antonio's own condition of "mercy" is that Shylock become a Christian and settle his property on Lorenzo and Jessica. Shylock answers, "I am content", says he is not well, and never appears again.

The situation

In Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, the Italian twins Luigi and Angelo Capello are visiting Dawson's Landing when Judge York Driscoll is stabbed to death with an Indian dagger. They are found beside the body, Luigi holding the knife, and are charged with murder. David Wilson, the lawyer nicknamed "Pudd'nhead" and without a practice for over twenty years, appears for the defence.

The case against them

1. Presence at the scene, immediately after the killing.
2. Possession of the weapon: Luigi was holding the knife.
3. Ownership of the weapon: the dagger was theirs, shown about the town, and advertised as stolen with a reward in terms that matched it exactly.
4. Motive: Luigi had kicked Tom Driscoll at a public meeting, and the Judge had taken up his nephew's quarrel to the point of a challenge.
5. Opportunity: they were there, at night, with nobody else accounted for.

4. He explains the science. Fingerprints are unique to each person, unchanging from infancy to death, and cannot be forged or worn away: a "natal autograph".

5. He proves the method in the room. He has jurors and officers of the court make prints there and then, mixes them, and identifies each person from his own slides. He demonstrates the reliability of his instrument to the tribunal before asking it to decide anything by it.

6. He applies it. The thumb-print on the knife matches neither twin, and on the very proposition the prosecution insisted upon, the case collapses.

7. He goes further. The print matches slides taken years earlier of Tom Driscoll, in court: "The murderer of your friend and mine, Judge Driscoll of the generous and kindly spirit, sits in your midst." Comparing the childhood slides he then discovers the exchange of the babies. Tom confesses.

Comment

1. It is a model of forensic method. He identifies the one fact provable independently of anybody's word, proves the method by which it can be read, and then reads it. Opinion is replaced by evidence, and the difference is two men's lives.

The occasion

The proceeding known as the Great Trial was held at the Government Circuit House, Shahi Bag, Ahmedabad, on 18 March 1922, before Mr C. N. Broomfield, I.C.S., District and Sessions Judge of Ahmedabad. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Shankarlal Banker, the printer and publisher of the weekly Young India, were the accused. The Advocate-General, Sir Thomas Strangman, appeared for the prosecution. Gandhi was unrepresented and conducted his own case.

The charge

Both were charged under Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, which made it an offence to bring or attempt to bring into hatred or contempt, or to excite disaffection towards, the Government established by law in British India. The charge arose from three articles written by Gandhi and published in Young India.

4. He named the shocks that ended that belief. "The first shock came in the shape of the Rowlatt Act, a law designed to rob the people of all real freedom." He led an intensive agitation against it, and "then followed the Punjab horrors beginning with the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh." He concluded that the connection had made India politically and economically helpless.

5. He argued that disaffection was a virtue in the circumstances. "Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law." If one has no affection for a person or system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to one's disaffection, provided one does not promote violence.

6. He attacked the section itself. "Section 124A, under which I am happily charged, is perhaps the prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen."

4. He passed sentence: six years' simple imprisonment, two years on each of the three counts, taking as his measure the sentence passed on Bal Gangadhar Tilak twelve years earlier.

5. He added the coda that is quoted as often as anything Gandhi said: if the course of events in India should make it possible for the Government to reduce the term and release him, "no one will be better pleased than I."

6. Gandhi replied that the sentence was as mild as any judge could have imposed, and that so far as the whole proceedings were concerned he could not have expected greater courtesy.

Banker was sentenced to a year's imprisonment and a fine. Gandhi served two years and was released in February 1924 after an operation for appendicitis.

Where the dispute comes from

The phrase comes from Sydall v Castings Ltd [1967] 1 QB 302, a decision of the Court of Appeal discussed in the prescribed Lord Denning extract. Two judges of that court both invoked Portia, from the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice, and each claimed her method for himself. The question is asking you to state both claims and to decide between them.

The case they were deciding

A workman named Sydall died. Money was payable under a group life assurance scheme operated by his employers, to be held for his "descendants" and "relations". He left a daughter, Yvette, who was illegitimate. The question was whether those two words covered her.

• The majority, Diplock LJ and Russell LJ, held that they did not. In a legal document, words such as "descendants" and "relations" bore their established legal meaning, which excluded the illegitimate. Yvette took nothing.

Russell's claim rests on Portia's refusal. She was faced with a sympathetic party, a harsh instrument and an appeal to bend the law a little for a good end, and she refused. A judge who yields to that appeal, however kindly his motive, has amended the document rather than construed it, and has told every future court that words mean what a judge would like them to mean. The temptation, Russell said, must be resisted.

Lord Denning's claim to be a Portia man

Denning replied by pointing out that Portia's refusal is not the end of the scene. Having declined to alter the decree, she went on to read the bond with absolute exactness, and found in it that it gave flesh but not one drop of blood, and that an exact pound must be taken or nothing. She saved Antonio without bending a word.

That is the moment Denning claims: "It is in this denouement that I would follow the example of Portia. I too am a Portia man."

The case for Russell. He is right that Portia refuses Bassanio, and right that the refusal is the more famous half. A rule that yields whenever a judge finds the result unattractive is not a rule. And there was an established meaning here: conveyancers had used those words in that sense for generations, and people had drafted in reliance on it.

The case for Denning. He is right that the refusal is not what saves Antonio. Portia is remembered for the blood point, not for the refusal, and the blood point is an act of construction, not of mercy. He is also right about the particular document: a benefit scheme for working men is not a settlement drawn by conveyancers, and reading it in the technical sense meant that the scheme's own beneficiaries could not understand who was covered.

Conclusion

Both claims are good, because Portia does two different things in the same scene, and each judge has fastened on one of them. Russell has the better of the first half and Denning of the second. The honest answer is that Portia is not a single method at all: she refuses to bend the law and then reads it so exactly that it bends itself, and a judge may take either lesson from her.