BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 1 English 1 2023-24 - ATKT 75/25 Question Paper with Solutions

The speaker is David "Pudd'nhead" Wilson, counsel for the Italian twins at their trial for the murder of Judge Driscoll, in Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson.

The testimony referred to is his fingerprint records: the collection of impressions on glass slides that he had taken of the townspeople over more than twenty years, together with the pantograph enlargements he had made from them. His live witnesses, the Misses Clarkson, had been delayed, and he rose and said he would probably not need their evidence at all, because he had this instead.

The speaker is Socrates, in Plato's Apology, addressing the court at Athens in 399 B.C. after sentence of death had been passed on him.

His interpretation is that death must be one of two things, and that both are gains. Either it is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, a sleep undisturbed even by dreams, in which case it is an unspeakable gain, since few days and nights of a man's life are better than one such night; or it is a change and migration of the soul to another world where all the dead abide, which is better still. On either alternative there is nothing to fear.

Answer: You will be given a ticket by the manager.

An equally correct alternative: A ticket will be given to you by the manager.

The changes made:

1. The verb give has two objects: you (the indirect object, the person) and a ticket (the direct object, the thing). Either may become the subject of the passive, which is why there are two right answers.
2. The verb becomes will be given: the future of be plus the past participle.
3. The subject the manager moves into a by-phrase.
4. If the thing is made the subject, the person needs the preposition to: "a ticket will be given to you".

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. Franting is an athlete: a dozen years earlier he had been perhaps the finest amateur boxer in England, and he bewildered his opponents by being left-handed. Bennett establishes his physical dominance as a fact about the man before it becomes a fact about the plot.

2. Brutal in temperament. He is 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. Bennett does not ask the reader to like him.

3. Coarse and insensitive. Where Harder is refined and inward, Franting is loud, worldly and blunt. He has no interest in what Harder values and no capacity to understand a man like him.

The case

In John Grisham's A Time to Kill, Carl Lee Hailey shoots the two men who attacked his ten-year-old daughter Tonya, as they are brought to the county courthouse in Clanton, Mississippi, and is charged with capital murder. Jake Brigance defends him. What turns a criminal trial into a siege is the arrival in Ford County of the Ku Klux Klan, an organisation that had not had an active presence there for years.

How it gets involved

1. Through the dead man's family. The brother of one of the men Carl Lee shot wants revenge and cannot get it lawfully, since the killer is in custody and will be tried. He reaches outside the county to people who will supply what the law will not.

2. A chapter is revived in Ford County. There was no functioning local organisation before the shooting. One is put together for this case, drawing on members from neighbouring counties, and the case becomes the occasion for its return.

2. Because it needs the publicity. The organisation is weak and shrinking in the Mississippi of the novel. A case with national coverage is an opportunity to recruit, and it is treated as one.

3. Because it wants to control the verdict. Threatening jurors is not an expression of feeling; it is an attempt to decide the case outside the courtroom.

4. Because it wants to punish the lawyer. Jake Brigance is a local white man defending Carl Lee, and the hostility directed at him is at least as intense as that directed at the defendant. He is treated as a traitor rather than as an advocate.

What it does to the trial

The involvement is the reason the case becomes what it is. It is why no other lawyer in Clanton would touch the brief, why Jake's application for a change of venue mattered so much and hurt so much when it was refused, why the jury had to be protected, and why the town was under guard. The organisation did not change the evidence; it changed the conditions under which the evidence could be heard.

4. Through a sequence of failures. He dines without money and is thrown out rather than charged; breaks a window and is not believed, because a guilty man would have run; behaves offensively to a woman who turns out to be willing; shouts and sings and is taken for a college boy celebrating; takes an umbrella from a man who had taken it himself. Five or six attempts, all failures, each 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, friends and clean thoughts. He resolves to find work and be somebody again. The presentation turns in that instant from comic to serious.

7. Through the closing irony. At the moment of resolve a policeman arrests him for loitering, and the magistrate gives him three months. He obtains what he wanted only once he has stopped wanting it.

The text

Francis Bacon's essay "Of Judicature" sets out what a judge is for. Bacon was Lord Chancellor of England, so the essay is written from inside the office, and it is arranged as a set of duties owed in four directions.

The first principle

"Judges ought to remember that their office is jus dicere, and not jus dare; to interpret law, and not to make law, or give law." This is the sentence the whole essay rests on. A judge declares what the law is; he does not create it. Bacon warns that a court which adds and alters under pretext of exposition, and "by show of antiquity introduces novelty", has taken a power that was never given it.

He states the personal qualities in the same breath: judges ought to be "more learned than witty, more reverend than plausible, and more advised than confident", and "above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue."

2. To the advocates who plead. "Patience and gravity of hearing is an essential part of justice; and an overspeaking judge is no well-tuned cymbal." It is no credit to a judge to discover for himself what he might have heard from the bar in due time, or to cut off evidence or counsel too short. Bacon then lists the four parts of a judge in hearing: (i) to direct the evidence; (ii) to moderate length, repetition or impertinency of speech; (iii) to recapitulate, select and collate the material points of what has been said; and (iv) to give the rule or sentence. Anything beyond these four is too much. He adds that judges should not have noted favourites among counsel, and that praise is due to an advocate who has argued well, "especially towards the side which obtaineth not".

3. To the clerks and officers of the court. "The place of justice is an hallowed place", and its precincts must be kept free of corruption. He names four bad instruments that infest courts: sowers of suits, who make the court swell and the country pine; those who engage courts in quarrels of jurisdiction, who are not amici curiae but parasiti curiae; those full of sinister tricks and shifts, who bring justice "into oblique lines and labyrinths"; and the exacter of fees, which is why courts are compared to the bush where a sheep flees for shelter and is sure to lose part of its fleece.

I hold an LL.M. in Constitutional and Administrative Law from the University of Mumbai (2019) and a Ph.D. on the doctrine of legitimate expectation in Indian administrative law (2024). I qualified in the UGC-NET (Law) in 2019. I have taught for four years at ____ Law College, Mumbai, where my subjects have been Constitutional Law, Administrative Law and Legal Method, and where I have also served on the Moot Court Committee.

I have seven publications in peer-reviewed journals and two chapters in edited volumes, and I have presented papers at six national and two international conferences. I am on the editorial board of the college law review and have supervised eleven dissertations at the LL.B. level.

Beyond teaching and research I have been closely involved in clinical legal education, having run a legal aid clinic for the past three years in association with the District Legal Services Authority. I should welcome the opportunity to continue that work at your University.

Examination	University	Year	Result
Ph.D. (Law)	University of Mumbai	2024	Awarded
UGC-NET (Law)	UGC	2019	Qualified
LL.M. (Constitutional and Administrative Law)	University of Mumbai	2019	72%
B.L.S. LL.B.	University of Mumbai	2017	68%

Teaching experience: Assistant Professor (ad hoc), ____ Law College, Mumbai, 2020 to date. Subjects: Constitutional Law I and II, Administrative Law, Legal Method.
Research: Seven articles in peer-reviewed journals; two chapters in edited volumes; eight conference papers.
Other work: Legal aid clinic in association with the District Legal Services Authority; Moot Court Committee; editorial board, college law review.
Areas of interest: Constitutional law, administrative law, legal education.
Languages: English, Hindi, Marathi.
References: Prof. ____, Head of Department, ____ Law College; Prof. ____, Faculty of Law, University of Mumbai.

Model answer

Aditi Sharma
14, Shanti Nivas, Dadar (West)
Mumbai 400028
+91 98XXXXXX21 | aditi.sharma@email.com

22 September 2024

The Ward Officer
G/North Ward, Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai
Dadar (West), Mumbai 400028

Subject: Infrequent and inadequate water supply to Shanti Nivas and adjoining buildings, Ranade Road, Dadar (West)

Sir/Madam,

I write on behalf of the residents of Shanti Nivas and four adjoining buildings on Ranade Road to bring to your notice the infrequent water supply in our locality, and to request your intervention.

Steps already taken. Complaints were lodged on the MCGM portal on 29 July 2024 (No. 91442) and 26 August 2024 (No. 97301), and a written representation was submitted at the ward office on 9 September 2024. No inspection has taken place and no reply has been received.

I therefore request that:

1. the supply line and the pressure at our connection be inspected at an early date, and any leakage or unauthorised connection on the line be attended to;
2. the full scheduled supply of two hours be restored;
3. the supply timings, and any planned interruption, be displayed at the ward office and communicated in advance to the building secretaries, so that residents are not left waiting each morning without information.

Adequate drinking water is a basic necessity, and the residents would be grateful for your early intervention. I shall gladly accompany your officers on inspection at any time convenient to them.

Thanking you,

We must alternately consult history and existing theories of legislation. But the most difficult labor will be to understand the combination of the two into new products at every stage.

The substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly corresponds, so far as it goes, with what is then understood to be convenient; but its form and machinery, and the degree to which it is able to work out desired results, depend very much upon its past. In Massachusetts today, while, on the one hand, there are a great many rules which are quite sufficiently accounted for by their manifest good sense, on the other, there are some which can only be understood by reference to the infancy of procedure among the German tribes, or to the social condition of Rome under the Decemvirs.

I shall use the history of our law so far as it is necessary to explain a conception or to interpret a rule, but no further. In doing so there are two errors equally to be avoided both by writer and reader.

How the precis was made

1. The passage runs to about 410 words, so roughly one-eighth of it, about 50, is what the question asks for. This is a severe compression and it forces a decision about what the passage is for.

2. Its four movements were identified, and the precis keeps all four in order:

• logic alone will not explain the common law;
• what has shaped it instead, the famous list;
• therefore it must be studied through history as well as through theory;
• and two errors to avoid in doing so.

3. Illustration was cut entirely. The reference to Massachusetts, the German tribes and Rome under the Decemvirs is an example of the third point and not a further point, so at this length it goes. So does the remark about starting with man full grown.

4. The famous list was kept, because it is the passage's substance and not its decoration: felt necessities, moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, and the prejudices judges share with their fellow men.

Model answer

Welcome Speech

Honourable Chief Guest Adv. Ujjwal Nikam; respected Principal; members of the faculty; distinguished judges of today's rounds; and my dear friends.

A very good morning to you all.

On behalf of the Moot Court Committee of ____ Law College, it is my privilege to welcome you to the Twelfth Intra-Collegiate Moot Court Competition, and it is my particular honour to welcome our Chief Guest.

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.

Sir, we know how heavy a trial lawyer's diary is, and we are grateful that you have made time to be with us. I now request you to inaugurate the competition and to address the gathering.

Thank you.

How she comes to be there

Portia, the heiress of Belmont, has no legal training and no right of audience anywhere. When Antonio's bond to Shylock is forfeit, she writes to her cousin Doctor Bellario of Padua, obtains from him a letter of recommendation and the gown and notes of a young doctor of laws, and appears in the Court of Venice as Balthazar. Nobody in that court knows who she is: not the Duke, not Antonio, and not her own husband Bassanio, whose closest friend's life is in her hands.

What she does, in order

1. She establishes the bond's validity. She reads it, asks whether Antonio confesses the bond, and confirms that "the Venetian law cannot impugn you as you do proceed." She gives Shylock everything he asks for on the law.

2. She appeals to mercy. The speech beginning "The quality of mercy is not strain'd" is an argument rather than an ornament: mercy is above the sceptre, it is an attribute to God himself, and in the strict course of justice none of us should see salvation.

7. She produces the alien statute. When Shylock says he will take the principal after all, she refuses; when he asks only for his bare bond, she refuses again. She then invokes the law of Venice against an alien who seeks the life of a citizen: half his goods to the injured party, half to the State, and his life at the Duke's mercy.

8. She takes the ring. Afterwards, still in disguise, she asks Bassanio for the ring she herself gave him as her fee, and afterwards convicts him of having parted with it.

Critical analysis: her merits as an advocate

1. She wins an unwinnable case, and by reading the document. No appeal to sympathy could have saved Antonio. She wins by construction, holding the instrument to its exact words, which is the most lawyerly skill there is.

2. Her preparation is complete. She has Bellario's notes, she knows the alien statute before she enters, and she has the whole sequence planned.

3. Her timing is superb. By confirming the bond and offering money three times before the reservation, she makes Shylock's refusal a matter of record, so that when the alien statute is produced he has already established the intent it requires.

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, and no court needed a trick about blood to say so. In Indian terms it would fail under Section 23 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872, being an agreement whose object is unlawful and involves injury to the person of another.

Portia does not take that ground. She upholds the bond, praises Shylock's insistence on the letter, calls him an upright judge and a most learned judge, and lets the case run until a man's shirt is open and a knife is in the air. That is superb theatre and very bad law, and the difference between the two is worth a paragraph.

The situation

In Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, the Italian twins Luigi and Angelo Capello are visitors to 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

Formidable, and entirely circumstantial:

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 their own, 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. The prosecution put it that Luigi had been warned he must kill or be killed at their next meeting.

3. He abandons his live witnesses. The Misses Clarkson, who would have testified to a veiled young woman leaving the premises after the cries for help, had been delayed. Wilson rose and said he would probably not need them: "I have other testimony, and better."

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" every human being carries and cannot lose.

5. He proves the method in the room. He has members of the jury 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 to the disputed print. The thumb-print on the knife matches neither twin, and on the very proposition the prosecution had insisted upon, the case against them collapses.

3. It succeeds by refusing the ordinary tools of advocacy. No rhetoric of the kind Serjeant Buzfuz employs in Bardell v Pickwick, no appeal to sympathy, no attack on any witness's honesty. Twain makes the contrast deliberately.

4. It was the only defence available. Without the print the twins had an unsupported denial, an absence of bloodstains that the town simply did not credit, and an unidentified woman in a veil. On that material they would have been convicted.

5. It is far ahead of its time, and Twain knew it. The novel appeared in 1894. Galton's Finger Prints was published in 1892 and Vucetich made the first fingerprint identification of a murderer the same year; 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.

6. It restores the lawyer as well as the accused. Wilson has been the town's joke for twenty-odd years because of the very hobby that wins the case, and the verdict makes him mayor. The town's judgment of Wilson was formed exactly as its judgment of Tom and Chambers was, on appearances, and was wrong for exactly as long.

The occasion

Plato's Apology records the trial of Socrates at Athens in 399 B.C., before a court of several hundred citizens. The word "apology" means defence, not an expression of regret, and this is the first point to make: nothing in the speech is apologetic in the modern sense.

The charges

Two, formally. That Socrates did not acknowledge the gods the city acknowledged and introduced new divinities, and that he corrupted the youth of Athens. Behind the indictment lay years of accumulated resentment and the atmosphere of a city recently defeated in war and briefly ruled by the Thirty Tyrants, several of whom had been associated with him. His accusers were Meletus, Anytus and Lycon.

3. He cross-examines his accuser. He turns on Meletus and destroys the indictment by its own terms. If he corrupts the young, who improves them? Meletus is driven to say that everyone in Athens improves them and Socrates alone corrupts them, which Socrates shows to be absurd, since in every other field the many spoil and the few improve. Then the fatal contradiction: the indictment charges him with introducing new divinities and Meletus also calls him a complete atheist, and both cannot be true. This is the only part of the speech that is a legal defence in the ordinary sense, and it succeeds.

4. He answers the charge of corrupting the young. Nobody deliberately makes his own associates worse, since a man surrounded by people he has corrupted is injured by them in turn; and if he did it unintentionally, the remedy is instruction and not prosecution.

5. He refuses to plead in the customary way. He will not weep, will not produce his children, will not beg. Such displays are a disgrace to the city, and, more importantly, a juror has sworn to judge according to law and must not be asked to make a present of justice.

To those who condemned him he prophesies that his execution will not silence criticism: younger and harsher critics will follow, whom he had been restraining, and the way to escape censure is not to silence the critic but to become better.

To those who voted to acquit he argues that death is not to be feared. His inner sign, which had opposed him all his life whenever he was about to do wrong, had not opposed him once that day. Death must be one of two things: annihilation, a dreamless sleep, which is a gain; or a migration of the soul, which is better still, since he would meet the true judges, and Orpheus, Hesiod and Homer, and Palamedes and Ajax who also suffered unjust judgments, and there nobody is put to death for asking questions. Either way, "no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death." His closing words: "I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows."

Assessment

As advocacy it fails, and deliberately. Every conventional device is available to him and he refuses each: the appeal to pity, the display of family, the modest counter-penalty, the promise to stop. He is convicted, and his counter-proposal converts a narrow majority into a decisive one.

Where the story comes from

The question refers to "The Joy of Reading", the prescribed essay by Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, published in the collection The Righteous Life: The Very Best of A. P. J. Abdul Kalam (Rupa, 2014). The essay is an argument, not a memoir, and its argument is that books are the cheapest and most reliable instrument of self-transformation available to an ordinary person. Kalam supports it with his own reading — he names, among others, Lillian Watson's Light from Many Lamps, bought in 1953 and kept all his life, and Alexis Carrel's Man the Unknown — and with the stories of named individuals whose direction in life was changed by what they read.

Steven is one of those individuals. The other, set as a separate question in other sittings of this paper, is V. Kathiresan.

4. Acquisition of a real skill or qualification. The reading is not general improvement; it produces something that can be examined and certified.

5. A changed life, and a lesson. The person ends in a position nobody would have predicted at the start, and Kalam draws the moral: this outcome is available to anybody who will do the same thing, which is why the story is told at all.

The companion story, which shows the pattern in full

V. Kathiresan was Kalam's driver at the Defence Research and Development Laboratory in Hyderabad in the late 1980s. Kalam noticed that in the hours of waiting the young man was reading newspapers, magazines and books, and encouraged him to study further. His duty hours ran from about ten in the morning to five in the evening, and he studied in the evenings. He passed his tenth standard, then his higher secondary, then took a B.A. in History and an M.A. in History from Madurai Kamaraj University, and became an assistant professor of History.

Every stage of the pattern is there: ordinary circumstances, a reader noticed and encouraged, evenings used for years rather than weeks, a genuine qualification, and a life entirely redirected.

Why it belongs on a law syllabus

Because legal study never finishes and is mostly unsupervised. Statutes are amended, judgments are delivered weekly, and no lecture will cover them. The professional reading that keeps a lawyer competent is done exactly as Kalam describes: in one's own hours, by one's own effort, over decades. The essay is set here not as inspiration but as a description of the working method of the profession.

The theme in its parts

1. The question the title asks. The phrase comes from Ecclesiastes, "a time to kill, and a time to heal", and the novel puts it as a question rather than an assertion. Was this such a time? Grisham never answers it in his own voice. He arranges the facts so that the reader must.

2. Vigilantism, and why a man reaches for it. Carl Lee does not act out of rage alone. He calculates: he asks Jake, before the shooting, what would happen to a man who did such a thing, and he acts because he has concluded that the courts will fail his daughter. The novel's most uncomfortable proposition is that his reasoning was not obviously wrong.

3. Race and the jury. The whole case turns on who sits in twelve chairs. The prosecution wants the trial in Ford County; the defence applies for a change of venue and is refused; the composition of the jury is fought over more fiercely than any point of law. A jury drawn from a community carries that community's assumptions into the room, and the novel says so without pretending there is an easy remedy.

7. The law as it is administered, not as it is written. Nothing in the Mississippi statute book distinguishes between defendants by race. Everything in the novel's Clanton does: who is prosecuted, who is believed, who can afford counsel, who sits on the jury. The theme is administration rather than legislation.

8. The persuasion of twelve people. The case is not won on the psychiatric evidence, which collapses when the defence expert is destroyed in cross-examination. It is won when Jake asks the jury to close their eyes, tells them what was done to a small girl, and then asks them to imagine that the child was white. He wins by making twelve people change the position from which they are looking.

What kind of ending it is

An answer worth full marks must say what the verdict does and does not establish. It is not a finding that the killing was lawful. What the novel delivers is narrower and harder: a defence where none was available, a trial rather than a lynching or a political conviction, a jury that decides on its own conscience, and an acquittal on a ground the law recognises.