BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 1 English 1 2018-19 Question Paper with Solutions

The speaker is Sarah Stone, a widow who kept a small shop licensed to sell tobacco, snuff and tea in Church Lane, Stoniton, and the lines are from Chapter XLIII, "The Verdict", of George Eliot's Adam Bede — the chapter containing the assize trial of Hetty Sorrel for child murder.

She is giving evidence. Having taken Hetty in and seen the child born in the night, she grew afraid the young mother was feverish and went out at about half past eight to fetch an experienced woman, leaving the prisoner sitting up by the fire in the kitchen. She was gone an hour and a half.

The decision is Lady Booby's, in Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (Book IV, Chapter II), spoken to Parson Abraham Adams. The full sentence runs: "our poor is numerous enough already; I will have no more vagabonds settled here."

It refers to Joseph Andrews, her former footman, who intends to marry Fanny Goodwill and settle in her parish. Adams has published their banns, and she has ordered him to publish them no more.

The plaintiff is Mrs Martha Bardell, and the speaker is Serjeant Buzfuz, her leading counsel, opening the case in Bardell against Pickwick in Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers.

He goes on to describe the late Mr Bardell, who, after enjoying "the esteem and confidence of his sovereign as one of the guardians of his royal revenues", "glided almost imperceptibly from the world" — Dickens noting that he had in fact been knocked on the head with a quart-pot in a public-house cellar.

The occasion is the assize trial of Hetty Sorrel at Stoniton, in George Eliot's Adam Bede, Chapter XLIII. John Olding, a labourer of Tedd's Hole, two miles out of Stoniton, is opening his evidence for the prosecution, and Eliot describes him as "a rough peasant".

His contribution was to find the body. He testified that a week last Monday, about one o'clock in the afternoon, going towards Hetton Coppice, he saw the prisoner in a red cloak sitting under a bit of a haystack near the stile, looking white and scared; and that afterwards, in an open place in the coppice, "there was a lot of timber-choppings put together just where the ground went hollow, like, under the bush, and the hand came out from among them."

Answer: The individual in black addressed the gentlemen and asked whether they were all agreed upon their verdict.

The changes made, and why:

(iii) "You feel faint." (Add a question tag)

Answer: You feel faint, don't you?

Why. The statement is positive, so the tag is negative. There is no auxiliary, and the verb feel is in the simple present with the subject you, so the auxiliary to supply is do, contracted to don't. The subject you is repeated.

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 that gives Harder a motive.
3. Coarse and insensitive, with no interest in what Harder values and no capacity to understand a man like him.
4. Domineering and used to winning, having always got his way by force of body and force of manner.
5. Fatally confident. He cannot conceive that the quiet poet in front of him is a danger. A man who has always been the strongest in the room does not look for other kinds of strength.

The situation. Soapy, the homeless man of O. Henry's "The Cop and the Anthem", needs three months' lodging for a New York winter. He refuses the missions, where a bed costs "humiliation of the spirit", and settles on Blackwell's Island, which asks nothing of his self-respect. His whole plan is to be arrested.

The ironies, in order.

1. He seeks arrest and cannot get it. The ordinary man fears the law; Soapy pursues it, and it will not have him.
2. Each failure inverts an expectation. He breaks a window and stays to confess, and the officer does not believe him because a guilty man would have run. He is offensive to a woman who turns out to be willing. He shouts and sings and is taken for a college boy celebrating a football victory — the same conduct is innocent in a better coat.
3. He prefers prison to charity. The institution meant to help humiliates; the institution meant to punish does not.

What it is. Civil contempt — in Indian terms, section 2(b) of the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971: the wilful disobedience of any judgment, decree, direction, order, writ or other process of a court, or wilful breach of an undertaking given to a court. It is the branch Lord Denning discusses under this heading in the prescribed extract.

Why it exists. An order that cannot be enforced is advice. If a court may be disobeyed with impunity, the winning party's judgment is worthless. The power is therefore the enforcement mechanism of the civil system, not an assertion of the judge's dignity.

Its features.

1. It is owed to a party, not to the public, which is why it can generally be waived or not pursued by the party who benefits.
2. The purpose is coercive, not punitive. The contemnor "carries the keys of the prison in his own pocket": committal lasts as long as the disobedience and ends on compliance.
3. The disobedience must be wilful. Inability to comply is not contempt; what is punished is the choice not to obey.

The rule. It is a contempt of court to publish material creating a real risk of prejudicing a trial that has not yet taken place. A case must be tried in court, on the evidence, and not in the newspapers. It is often called the sub judice rule.

What offends. Asserting that an accused is guilty before a jury has decided; publishing his previous convictions, which a jury may not hear; publishing a confession or evidence that may be ruled inadmissible; photographs where identification is in issue; comment on the merits of a pending civil case; and paying or interviewing witnesses before they testify.

The classic example. R v Bolam, ex parte Haigh (1949). While a man awaited trial for murder, a national newspaper described him as a vampire who had killed named people and dissolved their bodies in acid. The editor, Silvester Bolam, was sent to prison for three months and the proprietors heavily fined. It remains the standard illustration of trial by newspaper.

The case. Balogh v St Albans Crown Court [1975] QB 73, in the Court of Appeal, with Lord Denning MR.

The incident. Stephen Balogh was a casual clerk employed by defence solicitors at the new air-conditioned Crown Court at St Albans, at £5 a day and knowing no law. A long trial about pornographic films and books dragged on, and he got exceedingly bored and made a plan to liven it up. He stole a cylinder of nitrous oxide, laughing gas, meaning to release it through the ventilation ducts into Court No. 1 so that the judge, counsel and jury would be affected.

It never happened. He left the cylinder in a briefcase in a room above the court; it was found, the police were told, and he admitted his intention. Melford Stevenson J dealt with him summarily and committed him for six months.

The Court of Appeal released him, on three grounds:

1. Not a contempt in the face of the court — the plan was never executed, nothing happened in the court's presence, and the judge learned of it as any other person would.

What it is. A form of criminal contempt: publishing matter that scurrilously abuses a judge or a court, or imputes improper motives or partiality to it, so as to lower the authority of the court in the eyes of the public. In India it is section 2(c)(i) of the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971 — anything that "scandalises or tends to scandalise, or lowers or tends to lower the authority of, any court."

What it does not cover. Fair and reasonable criticism of a judgment is not contempt. The line is between criticising what a court decided and alleging that the judges were corrupt, biased or acting in bad faith.

Lord Denning's position, in R v Metropolitan Police Commissioner, ex parte Blackburn (No 2) [1968] 2 QB 150, is the passage to quote. A Member of Parliament had attacked the Court of Appeal in print, and the court declined to act:

Many environmental problems, as Israeli academic and author of the bestseller, Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, says have no national solutions. Global cooperation is the first and necessary step to successfully face these challenges.

(Hindustan Times, March 19, 2019.) Questions: 1. What are the observations by the Global Environment Outlook?

2. What have the reports warned national governments about?

3. What is the solution to environmental problems?

1. What are the observations by the Global Environment Outlook?

The report makes two observations, and both must be given.

First, environmental damage is killing people. Emissions, chemicals polluting drinking water and the accelerating destruction of ecosystems are together responsible for a quarter of all premature deaths across the world.

The defendant, Mr Pickwick, refused to pay a farthing of damages and went to the Fleet Prison instead.

The setting

Book IV, Chapter III of Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews. That morning Lady Booby had failed with Parson Adams, who refused to stop publishing the banns of Joseph Andrews and Fanny Goodwill, and who told her that lawyer Scout had advised him that a year's service gains a settlement. She called Scout "an impudent coxcomb". In the afternoon she sends for him.

The exchange

1. He reverses his own opinion. Fielding records that Scout "owned rightly, that a year's service gained a settlement" and might indeed have told the parson so. He now produces a new chain for the lady: Joseph is not "settled in fact"; if not settled in fact he is not an inhabitant; if not an inhabitant he is not of the parish. What he told Adams, he explains, was "on a supposition that he was settled in fact."

7. He identifies the real legal danger. "The subsequent marriage co-operating with the law will carry law into fact. When a man is married he is settled in fact, and then he is not removable." Stop the wedding and Joseph can be removed; allow it and he cannot.

8. He names his instrument. Justice Frolick, who "upon hearing your ladyship's name will commit him without any farther questions", and who has taken several poor off their hands "that the law would never lay hold on."

Analysis

1. It is a negotiation, not a consultation. She is not asking what the law is; she is buying an outcome, and he is bidding for the work.

2. Scout is not ignorant. The distinction between settlement in law and settlement in fact, and the point about marriage making a man irremovable, are real. He is unprincipled, which is worse.

3. Everything proposed is formally regular. There is a settlement law, a justice may commit, and damage to a hedge is an offence. What is corrupt is the purpose.

4. The client's power is the engine. The plan is hers before he arrives; he is an instrument, and an instrument goes wherever it is pointed.

The answer

No. He obtained a defensible result by a process that was unfair at almost every stage — and the strongest answer states that at the outset and then proves it, before conceding what can honestly be said on the other side.

The defects, in the order they occur

1. The judge announced his view before the evidence. The Duke told Antonio he was sorry for him, because he had come to answer "a stony adversary, an inhuman wretch, uncapable of pity, void and empty from any dram of mercy." A tribunal had described a party as sub-human before hearing a word.

2. The court was handed to a stranger on an unchecked letter. The Duke asked, "Came you from old Bellario?", gave Portia his hand, and seated her. He did not know who she was, did not test her qualification, and never found out.

What can be said on the other side

1. He was heard. He put his case at length, was invited three times to take his money, and refused on the record. 2. The bond was read exactly, and the reading was correct. It gave flesh and no blood. 3. The outcome was right. A man's life was saved from an instrument that should never have been enforceable.

Conclusion

A right result reached by a method that would not survive examination in any modern court. The deepest criticism is that the honest ground was available all along and was never taken: a bond for a pound of a man's flesh 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. Portia upheld the bond, praised Shylock's insistence on the letter, and let the case run until a knife was in the air.

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

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

5. The comparison. The print matched neither twin: "These men are innocent. I have no further concern with them."

6. The identification. It matched slides taken years earlier of Tom Driscoll, in court.

7. The childhood series. Returning to "the infant autographs of A and B", with pantograph facsimiles enlarged so the dullest eye could see at many feet that no two patterns were alike, he showed that the babies had been exchanged, and invited Tom to "make upon the window the finger-prints that will hang you."

3. He traced his change from loyalist to non-co-operator, having served in the Boer War, the Zulu rebellion and the Great War believing India could gain "a status of full equality in the Empire."

4. He named the shocks. "The first shock came in the shape of the Rowlatt Act, a law designed to rob the people of all real freedom"; then the agitation, and "the Punjab horrors."

5. He argued that disaffection had become a virtue. "Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law" — the one limit being that a man must not promote violence.

6. He attacked the section. "Section 124A... is perhaps the prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen."

7. He invited the maximum penalty, telling the judge that only two courses were open: to resign the office, or to inflict the severest penalty.

What it is

A Mareva injunction is an order restraining a defendant from removing his assets out of the jurisdiction, or otherwise disposing of or dealing with them, pending the trial of an action against him. It is now generally called a freezing order, and it is one of the developments of which Lord Denning was the author and about which he writes in the prescribed extract.

The case that names it

Mareva Compania Naviera SA v International Bulkcarriers SA [1975] 2 Lloyd's Rep 509, Court of Appeal, Lord Denning MR. Shipowners had chartered a vessel to charterers who defaulted on the hire. The charterers had money in a London bank account, and the owners feared that it would be moved abroad before judgment could be obtained, leaving them with a worthless decree. Denning granted an injunction restraining the removal of the funds.

The same principle had been applied days earlier in Nippon Yusen Kaisha v Karageorgis [1975] 1 WLR 1093, but the name that stuck was Mareva's.

5. It is usually sought without notice, which imposes a duty of full and frank disclosure: the applicant must tell the court everything material, including what is against him.

6. It must allow for ordinary living and business expenses and for legal costs, since its purpose is to preserve assets and not to shut the defendant down.

7. It was later extended to assets outside the jurisdiction (the worldwide freezing order), and it is now governed in England by the Civil Procedure Rules.

The Indian parallel

Indian law reaches the same end by statute: Order 38 Rule 5 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, which allows attachment before judgment where the court is satisfied that the defendant is about to dispose of or remove his property with intent to obstruct or delay execution of a decree. The threshold is high, and mere suspicion will not do. The court's general power under Section 151 and the ordinary law of injunctions supplement it.

4. The placard, turned into a document. "Apartments furnished for a single gentleman. Inquire within." He entreats the jury's attention to the wording; a juror asks whether there is a date; there is none.

5. An invented speech for his client, in which Mrs Bardell reflects on her late husband's virtues and resolves to let to a single gentleman. Nobody said any of it.

6. The serpent. "The serpent was on the watch, the train was laid, the mine was preparing." Within three days, "a being, erect upon two legs, and bearing all the outward semblance of a man, and not of a monster" knocked at the door: "This man was Pickwick."

7. Abuse of the defendant — "revolting heartlessness, and of systematic villainy" — with the suggestion that it would have been more decent had he stayed away.

8. The one allegation of a promise, asserted and not proved, and protected by the claim that Pickwick "took special care that there would be no witness".

9. The letters, and the argument from their innocence. They are "covert, sly, underhanded communications" and therefore "far more conclusive than if couched in the most glowing language". "Chops! Gracious heavens! and tomato sauce!" And the warming-pan, "a mere cover for hidden fire."

I am a student of the five-year B.L.S. LL.B. course at ____ Law College, Mumbai. My coursework in Legal Method, Legal Language and Legal Writing has given me a working grounding in legal research, drafting and case analysis. I am familiar with SCC Online and Manupatra, can prepare case briefs, indexes and issue notes, and I completed a four-week internship with Adv. S. Nair at the District Court, Mumbai.

I am particularly interested in in-house practice, which I understand to differ in character from litigation: the work is preventive rather than remedial, and the client is a colleague. If appointed I would be glad to assist with contract review and the maintenance of a contract database, compliance calendars and statutory filings, the drafting of routine agreements and notices under supervision, the co-ordination of external counsel, and the upkeep of the litigation tracker. I am comfortable working across time zones when a matter requires it.

My bio-data is enclosed. I would welcome the opportunity of an interview at a time convenient to you.

Experience: Four weeks with Adv. S. Nair, District Court, Mumbai, 2018.
Skills: Legal research, contract review, drafting, MS Office and document management systems, typing 40 w.p.m.
Languages: English, Hindi, Marathi.
Activities: Moot Court Committee; college law review.
References: Available on request.

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

Place: Mumbai
Date: 12 April 2019 Aditi Sharma

I write on behalf of the residents of Shanti Nivas and the adjoining buildings to record our concern at the continuing loss of tree cover in our locality on account of infrastructure works, and to request the action set out below.

The position. Over the past eighteen months, works in this ward have involved the felling or transplantation of a substantial number of mature trees, many of them decades old. On our own road, thirty-one trees were removed between October 2018 and March 2019. Residents were not informed in advance in most cases, no notice was displayed at the site, and we have not been able to ascertain how many of the trees marked for transplantation actually survived the process.

Our requests.
1. That the Tree Authority publish, for this ward, the permissions granted over the past two years, the number of trees felled and transplanted, and the compensatory plantation actually carried out.
2. That the survival rate of transplanted trees be independently audited and published, since transplantation is offered as the justification for removal.
3. That notice be displayed at the site before any further felling, with the permission number and the period for objections, as the Act contemplates.
4. That compensatory plantation be located within the same ward wherever possible, since the benefit of a tree is local.
5. That the residents' associations be consulted at the planning stage of future works, when the alignment can still be adjusted.

We are not opposed to development, and we recognise that a growing city needs its infrastructure. What we ask is that the statutory process be followed and be seen to be followed, so that what is lost is known, is necessary, and is genuinely replaced.

Thanking you,

The machinery. Films are certified by the Central Board of Film Certification under the Cinematograph Act, 1952 — the one medium subject to prior restraint, upheld in K. A. Abbas v Union of India (1970) on the ground that a film's impact is more immediate than a book's. Obscenity is governed by what was Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code, now the corresponding provision of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and by the standard laid down in Aveek Sarkar v State of West Bengal (2014), which replaced the Victorian Hicklin test with the community standards test.

The case for restriction. Some works genuinely incite violence or hatred. Children require protection. Obscenity that is merely commercial has no expressive value to weigh. And in a plural society deliberate insult to a community can produce real, physical harm.

The Indian courts' answer. In S. Rangarajan (1989) the Supreme Court held that the State cannot plead inability to maintain law and order as a ground for suppressing expression: it must maintain order, not suppress the speech. In Shreya Singhal (2015) it struck down Section 66A of the IT Act for vagueness, holding that discussion and advocacy are protected, and only incitement may be restricted.

Conclusion. Art may be restricted, and rarely should be. The right test is not whether a work offends but whether it incites, and the safeguards matter more than the rule: a closed list of grounds, a reasoned order, and a court at the end of it. A society that bans what offends it will end by banning whatever anybody is willing to riot about.

The forms it takes.
1. False claims of efficacy — cures, fairness, weight loss, height increase, examination results.
2. Bait advertising: a low price for a product available in negligible quantity.
3. The disappearing condition, where the qualification appears in print nobody can read or for a time nobody can pause.
4. False scarcity and false discounts, where the "original price" never existed.
5. Surrogate advertising, where a prohibited product is advertised under the name of another.
6. Undisclosed paid endorsement, now the commonest form, where an apparently personal recommendation is a paid advertisement.

Why the law intervenes. The ordinary answer of contract law — that the buyer should read the terms — assumes a party who can evaluate the claim. In a mass market with technical products, the consumer cannot verify and the seller knows it, and that asymmetry is what regulation exists to correct. False claims about medicines and food are, in addition, a question of health rather than of money.

What remains difficult. Enforcement is slow relative to a campaign's life; a penalty is often smaller than the revenue; puffery ("the best cup of tea in the world") is lawful and the line between puffery and a factual claim is genuinely hard; and influencer advertising is spread across millions of accounts.

Conclusion. India now has an adequate framework and an enforcement problem. The most effective single reform is the one already made — making the endorser answerable — because it puts the burden of verification on the person who was paid to be believed.

What has been achieved.
1. Education. The gap in school enrolment between girls and boys has closed almost entirely at the elementary stage, and women now outnumber men in many university courses, including law.
2. Political representation. The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments (1992) reserved one-third of seats and of chairperson offices in Panchayats and Municipalities for women; several States have raised it to half. Over a million women hold elected local office. The Constitution (106th Amendment) Act, 2023 extends the principle to the Lok Sabha and the State Assemblies.
3. Legislation. The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005; the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013, which put the Vishaka guidelines on a statutory footing; the daughter's equal coparcenary right under the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005; the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017; and the abolition of instant triple talaq.
4. The courts. Vishaka v State of Rajasthan (1997); Joseph Shine (2018), striking down adultery as an offence premised on a wife as her husband's property; Secretary, Ministry of Defence v Babita Puniya (2020), granting permanent commission to women officers; and Shayara Bano (2017).
5. Money. Self-help groups, Jan Dhan accounts and digital payments have given many women control of an income for the first time.