BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 1 English 1 2019-20 Question Paper with Solutions

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

The parties are Joseph Andrews and Fanny Goodwill. Adams has published their banns of marriage; Lady Booby has ordered him to publish them no more, and has given as her reason that Joseph is a vagabond who will bring a nest of beggars into the parish. This is his answer.

The verdict was returned at the assize trial of Hetty Sorrel at Stoniton, in George Eliot's Adam Bede — Chapter XLIII, which is titled "The Verdict".

Hetty was tried for child murder: the death and concealment of her newborn infant. After the evidence of Sarah Stone, who had sheltered her and seen the child alive, and of John Olding, who found the body hidden under timber-choppings, the jury returned this one word, and the judge passed sentence of death. Adam Bede was in court to hear it.

The speaker is Socrates, in Plato's Apology, after his conviction, when the court required him to propose a counter-penalty.

The Prytaneum was the public hall of Athens, where the city's sacred hearth was kept and where the State entertained at public expense its most honoured citizens, foreign ambassadors and victors at the Olympic games. Socrates tells the court that since he is a poor man who has given his life to their improvement, what he deserves is not a punishment at all but maintenance in the Prytaneum — the city's highest civic honour.

The speaker is Shylock, in the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice (Act IV, Scene i), answering Portia's appeal that he show mercy.

The oath is the one he swore by his holy Sabbath to have the due and forfeit of his bond — the pound of Antonio's flesh. He is telling the court that his promise is sworn in heaven and cannot be set aside on earth; to break it, he says, would be to lay perjury upon his soul.

The words are Lord Denning's, from his dissenting judgment in Sydall v Castings Ltd [1967] 1 QB 302, which is reproduced and discussed in the prescribed Lord Denning extract.

A "denouement" is the unravelling — the point at which the knot of a plot is untied and the complication resolved. Here it is the moment in the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice when Portia finds that the bond gives flesh but not one drop of blood, so that Shylock cannot take his forfeit at all.

Who he is

Soapy is the homeless man at the centre of O. Henry's "The Cop and the Anthem": a man on a bench in Madison Square, with a New York winter coming and three months' lodging to arrange.

How O. Henry presents him

1. Through his plan, not his past. We learn almost nothing of his history until the end. He is defined by what he decides to do: get himself arrested, so that Blackwell's Island will house him for the winter.

2. As a man with a code. 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. Prison asks nothing of his self-respect, and the whole plot follows from that distinction.

3. In mock-heroic language. His bench is his "winter quarters" and his schemes are a campaign, so that a shabby man's plan to be arrested is narrated in the register of statesmanship.

Comment

Soapy is built by an accumulation of small refusals: he refuses charity, refuses despair, refuses to be pitied. The method is comic on the surface and critical underneath, and the criticism falls on the law rather than on the man.

5. Protected by other people's assumptions. Nobody suspects him because nobody can picture him doing it. His mildness is his best alibi.

6. Undone by physical detail, when the detective Dr Austin Bond is brought in because the ordinary methods fail against a man nobody suspects.

Bennett's design

Harder exists to unsettle the assumption that violence belongs to violent-looking people. He is set against Franting at every point — the poet and the boxer, the man of the mind and the man of the body — and Bennett titles the story with a single blunt word so that nobody can slide past what has happened by attending only to what the victim deserved.

The decision below

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

The appeal

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

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

What it is

Disobedience to an order of the court is civil contempt. In Indian terms, section 2(b) of the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971 defines it as 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 of contempt that Lord Denning discusses under this heading in the prescribed extract.

Why it exists

An order that cannot be enforced is advice. If a court can be disobeyed with impunity, the winning party's judgment is worthless and the losing party has been given a choice the law never intended him to have. The power to punish is therefore the enforcement mechanism of the whole civil system, not an assertion of the judge's dignity.

5. Strict procedure. Because liberty is at stake, the order must have been clear and unambiguous, it must have been properly served, it must have carried a penal notice warning of the consequences, and the contempt must be proved beyond reasonable doubt even though the proceedings are civil.

Conclusion

Disobedience to an order is the one form of contempt that exists for the benefit of a private litigant, and the law surrounds it with more safeguards than any other precisely because the remedy is imprisonment in a civil dispute. The object is compliance, and every rule around it is designed to get compliance at the lowest possible cost to liberty.

and he has now apologised." a) Which is the case referred to in the above passage? Give a brief account of the same.

The case

Balogh v St Albans Crown Court [1975] QB 73, known as the laughing gas case, decided by the Court of Appeal with Lord Denning MR presiding. The passage is from his judgment, and the case is one of those discussed in the prescribed Denning extract.

The facts

Stephen Balogh was a casual clerk employed by the defence solicitors at the Crown Court at St Albans, at £5 a day and knowing no law. A long trial about pornographic films and books dragged on in Court No. 1, and he got exceedingly bored and made a plan to liven it up.

2. There was no urgency. The cylinder had been seized and the plan had failed. Balogh could perfectly well have been prosecuted in the ordinary way for the theft or for an attempt, and the summary power should be used only when it is urgent and imperative to act immediately.

3. The sentence was in any event excessive. He had spent 14 days in prison and had apologised, and Denning held that was enough "to purge his contempt, if contempt it was."

Why the case matters

1. It fixes the boundary of the summary power, which is one of the most drastic a judge holds: punishment on the spot, without charge, trial or jury. 2. It insists on proportion. Six months for a plan that failed, imposed at once by the judge who was its intended target, was out of all measure. 3. It leaves the ordinary law available. Denning is not saying the conduct was harmless; he is saying it should have been dealt with in the ordinary way, with a charge, a defence and a trial.

The background

Thalidomide was a drug marketed in Britain by the Distillers Company and taken by pregnant women in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It caused very severe deformities in the children born to them, and several hundred British families were affected. The parents sued, and the litigation dragged on for more than ten years without coming to trial, while settlement negotiations went on privately.

The dispute

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 criticise the settlement Distillers had offered. On 12 October 1972 the Attorney-General issued a writ for an injunction, on the ground that publication would be a contempt of court because it prejudged an issue in proceedings still pending.

The decisions

• The Divisional Court granted the injunction.

Why it matters

It is the clearest illustration in the prescribed material of a collision between two things the law values equally: the right of a court to decide a case on the evidence, undisturbed by public campaigns, and the right of a free press to discuss a matter of grave public concern. Both propositions are correct, and this case is where they met head-on.

Model answer (about 160 words)

Social networking sites are now the main channel through which Indians read news, argue politics, do business and keep company. Whether they are a boon or a bane depends less on the technology than on how it is used and regulated.

The boon. They give an ordinary person a public voice that once belonged only to newspaper proprietors. They keep families connected across distances, have become livelihoods for small traders and teachers, and organise help quickly in a flood or a bed shortage.

The bane. Falsehood travels faster than correction, and lynchings in India have followed forwarded rumours. They are engineered to be habit-forming; they expose children to harassment and adults to fraud; and their recommendation systems reward outrage, which hardens opinion into hostility.

Model answer (about 165 words)

Capital punishment is the execution of an offender by the State under sentence of a court. In India it is retained for a limited class of offences, chiefly murder, waging war against the State, and certain aggravated sexual offences.

The Indian position. In Bachan Singh v State of Punjab (1980) the Supreme Court upheld the death penalty, laying down that it may be imposed only in the "rarest of rare" cases, when life imprisonment is unquestionably foreclosed. Life imprisonment is the rule and death the exception, and the court must record special reasons. In Mithu (1983) a mandatory death sentence was struck down. There are safeguards after sentence: confirmation by the High Court, appeal, and the power of pardon under Articles 72 and 161.

For: retribution proportionate to the crime, deterrence, protection, and public confidence.

2. The widow. "The plaintiff, gentlemen, is a widow; yes, gentlemen, a widow." The late Mr Bardell, after enjoying the esteem and confidence of his sovereign as one of the guardians of the royal revenues, "glided almost imperceptibly from the world" — Dickens notes that he had in fact been knocked on the head with a quart-pot in a public-house cellar.

3. The child. Before his death Mr Bardell "had stamped his likeness upon a little boy", the only pledge of her departed exciseman.

4. The placard, turned into a document. "Apartments furnished for a single gentleman. Inquire within." He entreats the jury's attention to the wording; several take a note of it; a juror asks whether there is a date; there is none, and Buzfuz simply says he is instructed it was put up three years ago.

5. An invented speech for his client, in which Mrs Bardell reflects on her husband's qualities and resolves to let her rooms to a single gentleman. None of it was said by anybody, and it is the most effective passage in the address.

9. The letters, and the argument from their innocence. They are "not open, fervent, eloquent epistles" but "covert, sly, underhanded communications", and therefore "far more conclusive than if couched in the most glowing language". Of the first: "Chops! Gracious heavens! and tomato sauce!" Of the second, which has no date, "which is in itself suspicious": who ever troubles himself about a warming-pan, "a harmless, a useful, and I will add, gentlemen, a comforting article of domestic furniture", unless it is "a mere cover for hidden fire"?

10. The peroration. "My client's hopes and prospects are ruined." The bill is down but there is no tenant; all is gloom and silence in the house; even the voice of the child is hushed. And then Pickwick three times over: "the ruthless destroyer of this domestic oasis in the desert of Goswell Street."

Critical analysis

1. Not one of these is an argument about the promise. They are arguments about pathos, character, and the sinister construction of innocent documents. The single sentence alleging an actual offer is asserted and not proved, and is protected in advance by the claim that there was no witness by design.

The case

Hetty Sorrel is tried at the Stoniton assizes in George Eliot's Adam Bede (Chapter XLIII, "The Verdict") for child murder. She had left home in secret when her pregnancy could no longer be hidden, failed to find Arthur Donnithorne, given birth alone on the road, and says nothing in her own defence at any stage. The prosecution case is therefore wholly circumstantial.

Who Sarah Stone is

A widow who keeps a small shop licensed to sell tobacco, snuff and tea in Church Lane, Stoniton, and a complete stranger to the prisoner. Eliot introduces her in one sentence: "A woman was in the witness-box, a middle-aged woman, who spoke in a firm distinct voice." She has no standing, no expertise and no interest in the outcome.

4. Hetty's manner. The next day the girl would take no denial but got up and dressed, and showed wonderful spirit; but she had a strange look about the eyes and grew flushed towards evening, and Sarah Stone was afraid of the fever.

5. Going out. At about half past eight she left by the back door into the alley to fetch an experienced woman, "I left the prisoner sitting up by the fire in the kitchen." She was gone an hour and a half.

6. The return. The candle was burning just as she had left it, and the prisoner and the baby were both gone. "She'd taken her cloak and bonnet, but she'd left the basket and the things in it. I was dreadful frightened, and angry with her for going."

7. Why she did not report it. She had no thought the girl meant any harm, knew she had money in her pocket for food and lodging, and did not like to set the constable after her, "for she'd a right to go from me if she liked."

Analysis of the testimony

1. It supplies the element nothing else could: a live birth. Without proof that the child was born alive there is no death and no offence.

Conclusion

Sarah Stone's testimony is the cornerstone of the prosecution: credible because disinterested, unshakeable because it rests on her own work, and unbearable because it comes from the only person who had shown the accused any mercy. Eliot uses it to show that a trial can be perfectly conducted and still be a tragedy.

The defence, such as it was

1. He accepted full responsibility, and asked the court to hold him responsible in preference to the men who had acted on his words.

2. He accepted responsibility for violence he had not intended. Of Chauri Chaura, where a mob burned a police station, and of the Bombay and Madras disorders, he said he had underestimated the forces of evil, that he knew he was playing with fire and ran the risk, and that if set free he would do the same again. "I wanted to avoid violence. Non-violence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed."

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

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." He concluded that the connection had made India politically and economically helpless.

He said the law is no respecter of persons, but that it was impossible to ignore that Gandhi was "in a different category from any person I have ever tried or am likely ever to try", and that even those who differed from him in politics looked upon him as "a man of high ideals and of noble and even saintly life." He nevertheless held it his duty to judge him as a subject of the State, owing allegiance to it.

He passed six years' simple imprisonment, two years on each of three counts, taking as his measure the sentence on Bal Gangadhar Tilak twelve years earlier, and added that if the course of events made it possible for the Government to reduce the term, "no one will be better pleased than I." Gandhi replied that the sentence was as mild as any judge could have imposed and that he could not have expected greater courtesy. He served two years.

Assessment

Both men behaved impeccably and the outcome was still unjust. Gandhi refused every device open to an accused; Broomfield was courteous, gave him every latitude, and applied a law he was bound to apply. The injustice lay in the law, not in the conduct of the court, and each of them said so from his own side.

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

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

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

5. The comparison with the weapon. The thumb-print on the knife matched neither twin, and he said, indicating them, "These men are innocent. I have no further concern with them. We will now proceed to find the guilty."

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

1. It was sprung without notice, and Wilson's own justification for producing it late concedes that notice would ordinarily be required.

2. The advocate was his own expert. Counsel cannot be his own witness: there is nobody to cross-examine, and the tribunal cannot separate the opinion from the advocacy.

3. There was no independent verification. The slides were his own, made, labelled and kept by him — the very thing he himself doubted for half an hour the night before, walking the floor and muttering that the baby's prints did not tally and that "I never labeled one of these things carelessly in my life."

4. No chain of custody for the knife is anywhere established.

Conclusion

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