BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 1 English 1 2024-25 - ATKT 75/25 Question Paper with Solutions

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

He says it to Lady Booby, who has ordered him to publish the banns of Joseph and Fanny no more, and who, when he will not agree, threatens to recommend to "your master, the doctor" that he "discard you from his service". Adams replies that he does not know what she means by those terms, since he is in the service of a Master who will never discard him for doing his duty.

The speaker is David "Pudd'nhead" Wilson, the lawyer of Dawson's Landing, in Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson.

The revelation is the exchange of the two babies in the cradle. Comparing his fingerprint records, Wilson discovers that the man raised as the heir Tom Driscoll is in fact Roxy's son, and that the man treated all his life as the slave Chambers is the true heir. The switch was made in infancy by Roxy and had gone unsuspected by the whole town for twenty-three years.

The speaker is Sarah Stone, a widow of Stoniton, in George Eliot's Adam Bede. Another sitting of this paper prints her sentence in full: "I made them myself and had kept them by me ever since my last child was born."

The context is the assize trial of Hetty Sorrel. Sarah Stone is in the witness box, and the baby-linen found with the dead child has been produced in court as an exhibit. She identifies the clothes as her own work, made by her hand and kept in her house since the birth of her own last child, and given by her to the young woman she had taken in. Her identification of them ties the dead child to the infant she saw alive in Hetty's arms.

Answer: Mr Richard requested me to wait there till he returned.

The changes made, and why:

Answer: She is going to the store, isn't she?

The rule applied: the statement is positive, so the tag is negative. The auxiliary is is, which is repeated with not in its contracted form, and the subject she is repeated as the pronoun she.

Who Soapy is, and what he wants

Soapy is the homeless man at the centre of O. Henry's story "The Cop and the Anthem". Winter is coming to Madison Square, and he needs three months' lodging. He refuses the charity of the missions and shelters, where a bed is paid for with "humiliation of the spirit", and settles instead on Blackwell's Island, the workhouse prison, which asks nothing of his self-respect. His whole plan is therefore to get himself arrested.

The failures that precede the change

Five attempts, five failures, and the joke in each is that the law will not attend to him.

1. He dines well at a restaurant intending not to pay, and is thrown into the street instead of charged.
2. He breaks a shop window and tells the policeman he did it, and is not believed, because a guilty man would have run.
3. He eats a cheap meal without money, and the waiters simply put him out.
4. He behaves offensively to a young woman in the street, and she is willing to go with him.

The irony that follows

At the moment of that resolution a policeman's hand falls on his arm. Asked what he is doing there, Soapy answers "Nothin'", and is arrested for loitering. The next morning the magistrate at the Police Court gives him "three months on the Island", which is precisely what he spent the whole day trying and failing to obtain.

What the change of heart means

1. It is genuine, not a device. O. Henry gives it the fullest and most serious writing in the story, and nothing suggests that Soapy is deceiving himself.

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, and that is the point. The arrest is not a punishment for the day's offences, of which the officer knows nothing. It is a punishment for standing still, in shabby clothes, outside a church at night.

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 argues on Monday the opposite of what was argued on Friday. Dickens made it through Serjeant Buzfuz and Dodson and Fogg, 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 put one case as strongly as it can be put. 2. Guilty people are defended, which to a layman looks like assisting a lie. 3. Opposite positions on different days. The same advocate may argue strict construction in one matter and liberal construction in the next. 4. Technicality. Cases turn on limitation, jurisdiction and procedure rather than merits. 5. Real misconduct exists, and Dodson and Fogg are not entirely fictional.

5. The duty to the court outranks the duty to the client. An advocate is an officer of the court first, and that single rule answers the whole charge.

Conclusion

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

3. Social and economic democracy, not merely political democracy. His central warning: on 26 January 1950 India would enter "a life of contradictions", equality in politics and inequality in social and economic life, and those denied equality long enough would "blow up the structure of political democracy".

4. Democracy as a mode of associated living, "of conjoint communicated experience", rather than as a form of government or a counting of votes.

5. Constitutional morality, which he warned is "not a natural sentiment" in India and must be cultivated, since forms alone will not work.

6. No hero-worship, and no unconstitutional methods. Quoting John Stuart Mill, he warned against laying one's liberties at the feet of a great man: bhakti in religion may be a road to salvation, but in politics it is "a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship". He also asked that the "grammar of anarchy" be abandoned once constitutional means existed.

7. Education, organisation and agitation, his prescription to the oppressed for securing the change by their own effort.

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. It is his treatment of Emily, the woman both men care for, that gives Harder a motive, and 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.

I am a first-year student of the five-year B.L.S. LL.B. course at ____ Law College, Mumbai. My coursework in Legal Method, Legal Language and Economics has given me a grounding in legal research, drafting and case analysis, and I have completed a certificate course in legal writing. I am familiar with SCC Online and Manupatra, and I have taken part in two intra-collegiate moot court competitions, reaching the semi-final in the second.

I am particularly interested in your firm's civil and commercial litigation practice, and I would be glad to assist with research, case briefs, indexing and any drafting entrusted to me under supervision. I am available for six weeks from 1 May 2025 and can attend court with your juniors as required.

My bio-data is enclosed. I would welcome the opportunity of an interview at your convenience.

Thanking you,

Yours faithfully,
Rohan Kulkarni

Encl.: Bio-data

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Model answer

Rohan Kulkarni
22, Green Meadows, Andheri (East)
Mumbai 400069
+91 98XXXXXX36 | rohan.kulkarni@email.com

8 April 2025

The Municipal Commissioner
Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai
Mahapalika Marg, Fort, Mumbai 400001

Subject: Repeated failure of electricity supply and non-working street lights, Green Meadows and adjoining lanes, Andheri (East)

Sir/Madam,

I write on behalf of the residents of Green Meadows and the three adjoining buildings on Marol Church Road to bring to your notice the repeated failure of electricity supply in our locality, and to request your intervention.

I therefore request that:

1. the ward electrical department inspect the locality and secure the open feeder pillar at once, as it is a present danger;
2. the eleven street lights on Marol Church Road be restored, this being a municipal responsibility;
3. the matter be taken up with the licensee supplying this area, and the residents be informed in writing of the cause of the failures and the steps taken.

Reliable electricity and lit public streets are basic to the safety of a residential area, 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,

Yours faithfully,
Rohan Kulkarni
(Secretary, Green Meadows Co-operative Housing Society)

Copy to: The Assistant Commissioner, K/East Ward; the Nodal Officer of the supply licensee.

"Sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Sustainable development clearly postulates an anthropocentric bias, least concerned with the rights of other species which live on this earth. Anthropocentrism is always human-interest focused thinking that considers non-humans as having only instrumental value to humans, in other words, humans take precedence and human responsibilities towards non-human are based on benefits to humans.

Eco-centrism is nature-centred, where humans are part of nature and non-humans have intrinsic value. In other words, human interest does not take automatic precedence and humans have obligations towards non-humans independently of human interest.

Title: Sustainable Development, Eco-centrism and the Public Trust

Precis (148 words)

The United Nations defines sustainable development as development meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. That definition is anthropocentric: it treats non-human life as valuable only for its usefulness to people, so that human duties towards other species rest on human benefit. Eco-centrism takes the opposite view. It is nature-centred and life-centred, placing humans within nature and recognising that non-humans have intrinsic worth, so that human interest does not automatically prevail and obligations towards other species exist independently of it.

3. The definitions were compressed, not dropped. Anthropocentrism and eco-centrism are the passage's key terms, and a precis that omits either has lost the argument. Each is reduced to one clause naming what it treats as valuable.

4. Lists were shortened. "Rivers, seashores, forests and the air" is kept because the public trust doctrine is a doctrine about which resources; "air, sea, waters, and the forests" repeats it a second time and is dropped.

5. It is in the third person, in the writer's own words, in connected prose, and introduces nothing that is not in the original.

What this Committee is for. A law college teaches us to read, to argue and to appear. The Cultural Committee looks after everything else: the annual festival, the intercollegiate competitions, the music, drama, debate and dance that make five years here something more than a course of study. Those are not distractions from our training. A student who has stood on a stage is a student who will one day stand up in court without her voice shaking.

What I propose for this year. Three things, briefly.

First, an annual calendar published in the first month, so that events are known in advance and nobody has to choose between a rehearsal and a submission.

Second, participation before performance. I would like every one of the five years represented in at least one event, and I would like the first-year students brought in from the beginning rather than in their second year.

The evidence, such as it is

1. Two notes, produced as love letters. The first: "Dear Mrs B., Chops and Tomata sauce. Yours, Pickwick." The second: "Dear Mrs B., I shall not be at home till to-morrow. Slow coach... Don't trouble yourself about the warming-pan." Buzfuz treats the absence of any endearment as proof of a settled understanding, and finds a sinister meaning in the chops and the warming-pan.

2. Mrs Cluppins, who admits that she overheard the conversation from outside the door, having stopped to listen, and whose account is consistent with a proposal only if one already believes there was one.

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 enormous harm.

3. The judge does not judge. Mr Justice Stareleigh is deaf, irritable and chiefly anxious to finish. He mishears names, muddles Winkle's evidence, notes down what suits him, and reserves his energy for the dignity of his court, remarking that had the disturber been pointed out, "I would have committed him instantly." He never once restrains Buzfuz. In a system that relies on the judge to hold counsel to the evidence, an inattentive judge is nearly as damaging as a corrupt one.

4. The defence is not put. Snubbin is competent but disengaged; Phunky, the junior, is nervous, and in examining Winkle opens a door through which Buzfuz walks. Mr Pickwick's own defence, that he was talking about a servant, is true, absurd and unprovable, and nobody makes the jury feel it.

5. The witnesses damage the side that called them. Dickens's sharpest procedural joke is that the plaintiff's best witnesses are the defendant's three friends, honest men who tell the truth and destroy him with it, because the truth stripped of its context is that he was found holding her.

Conclusion

The proceedings are a study in how a court reaches a wrong result without anybody in the room telling a lie. Mrs Bardell genuinely believes she was proposed to; the witnesses genuinely saw what they describe; the judge genuinely wants order; the jury genuinely decides. What is missing is the one thing that would have exposed the case, an insistence on evidence of the promise itself, and no one present takes responsibility for supplying it. That is a heavier charge than any accusation of corruption would have been.

The defence, step by step

1. He deals first with the old accusers, not the new ones. Socrates says the dangerous charges are not those on the indictment but the ones circulating for years: that he speculates about things in the heavens and below the earth, and "makes the worse appear the better cause". These he cannot cross-examine, because their authors are not in court. Beginning here is a deliberate forensic choice: he attacks the prejudice before he touches the pleading.

2. He explains why he is unpopular. The oracle at Delphi had said no man was wiser than he. Disbelieving it, he questioned those reputed wise, politicians, poets and craftsmen, and found that each claimed knowledge he did not possess. His own wisdom, he concludes, consists only in knowing that he does not know. The questioning humiliated important people, and their resentment produced the prosecution.

6. He states his position on obedience. He will obey the god rather than the court, and will not give up questioning while he has breath, because "the unexamined life is not worth living." He compares himself to a gadfly stinging a large, well-bred and sluggish horse, and warns that in killing him they will not easily find another.

7. He calls his poverty as his witness. He has taken no fees, unlike the sophists, and has neglected his own affairs for thirty years. His destitution, he says, is the proof that he is telling the truth about his mission.

The verdict, the penalty and the last speech

He is convicted by a modest majority, and remarks that he had expected worse. Required to propose a counter-penalty, he says that what he actually deserves is maintenance in the Prytaneum at public expense, the honour reserved for Olympic victors. Only at his friends' urging does he offer a fine of thirty minae, which they guarantee. The court sentences him to death, and the second vote is more heavily against him than the first.

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.

Conclusion

Socrates' defence is the first great statement of the conflict between the law of a state and the conscience of a citizen. The court had jurisdiction, the procedure was that of Athenian democracy, and the verdict was lawful. It was also, by common consent ever since, wrong.

The pattern every one of these stories follows

Kalam narrates them to a fixed design, and the design is the answer. Elsewhere in the essay he sums up such a life in a single sentence, which another sitting of this paper prints as a quotation: "What extraordinary commitment and dedication had helped him to acquire the right skills in his leisure time and changed the course of his life." Take that sentence apart and you have the five stages of the story:

1. Ordinary, unpromising circumstances. The person begins with no advantage of birth, money or schooling. Kalam is emphatic that his examples are not exceptional people; if they were, they would prove nothing.

2. Encounter with a book, or with someone who puts a book in his hands. The turn is always a specific text or a specific person who encourages reading. Nothing dramatic happens; somebody simply begins to read.

3. Use of leisure hours. This is the heart of it, and the phrase Kalam himself uses. The person does not leave his work or find a patron. He uses the hours after work, the hours everybody else spends otherwise, and he uses them for years.

What Kalam concludes from these stories

1. Reading is not a leisure activity but a method. The stories exist to show that the ordinary hours of an ordinary week are enough, if they are used.

2. Access, not ability, is what separates readers from non-readers. Kalam never suggests that some people are readers by nature. This is why the same essay argues for home libraries: put the books within reach and the reading follows.

3. One person's encouragement can be decisive. In each story somebody notices and says something. Kalam presents this as a duty rather than a kindness.

4. The outcome is repeatable. That is the whole purpose of naming real, obscure people instead of famous ones. A story about a great man proves that great men exist; a story about a driver proves what is available to a reader.

The facts

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 never 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 the process. He is charged with capital murder and faces the gas chamber. He asks Jake Brigance, a young white lawyer who had earlier defended his brother, to appear for him.

4. He fights the pre-trial battles that decide the trial. He applies for a change of venue, arguing that no fair jury can be found in Ford County. Judge Omar Noose refuses it, but the application preserves the point. He works on the jury list, and it is through the composition of the jury that the defence's slender chance survives. Grisham gives the preliminaries as much space as the trial, and does so deliberately: most cases are decided before the opening statement.

5. He builds a team out of nothing. Against the resources of the State 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 authorities. He secures Dr W. T. Bass as the psychiatric expert.

6. He survives the collapse of his own expert. Buckley destroys Bass in cross-examination by exposing an old conviction, and the psychiatric evidence goes down with him. The State's expert, Dr Rodeheaver, is credible and unshaken. Jake does not abandon the defence; he shifts the ground to the jury's own moral judgment.

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

Conclusion

Jake Brigance supplies the four things an adversarial 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.

4. There was prior ill-feeling: Luigi had kicked Tom Driscoll at a public meeting, and there was bad blood between the twins and the Driscoll family.
5. They were foreigners, and the town was disposed to believe the worst of them.

The prosecution, conducted by Pembroke Howard, needs to do very little. Nobody in Dawson's Landing doubts the verdict, and the twins' own counsel is a standing joke.

Wilson's conduct of the defence

1. He does not attack the witnesses. The eyewitness account is honest, and Wilson does not pretend otherwise. He accepts that the twins were at the scene and that Luigi held the knife. This is the decision on which everything turns: an advocate who disputes what plainly happened loses the jury before he begins.

2. He looks for physical evidence instead. He knows that the murderer grasped the handle, and that there is a bloody thumb-print on it. That print, not the testimony, becomes his case.

7. He discovers the second, larger fact. Comparing the childhood slides, Wilson finds that the infant prints filed under "Tom" belong to the man now called Chambers and the reverse: the babies were exchanged in the cradle, so that the man in the dock's clothes is a slave and an impostor, and the man treated as a slave for twenty-three years is the true heir. Tom confesses in open court.

Comment on the defence

1. It is a model of forensic method. Wilson does not try to make an unlikely story sound likely. He identifies the one fact that can be proved 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.

2. It succeeds by refusing the ordinary tools of advocacy. There is no rhetoric of the kind Serjeant Buzfuz employs in Bardell v Pickwick, no appeal to sympathy, and no attack on the honesty of witnesses. Twain makes the contrast deliberate: this is what a defence looks like when it has something real to work with.

Conclusion

Wilson's defence of the twins is the most complete demonstration in this syllabus of what an advocate can do when he stops arguing and starts proving. It acquits two innocent men against the settled opinion of an entire community, identifies the real murderer, and uncovers a fraud twenty-three years old, all from one mark on a knife handle. Its lesson is not that fingerprints are useful, but that a defence is strongest when it rests on something the court can verify for itself.