BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 1 English 1 2021-22 Question Paper with Solutions

Answer: A. Portia.

The lines are the close of her speech on mercy in the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice (Act IV, Scene i), addressed to Shylock.

Why the others are wrong: Antonio says almost nothing in the scene and asks for no mercy; the Duke speaks earlier, and his contribution is to call Shylock an inhuman wretch; Bassanio offers money and asks the court to bend the law, which is a different argument altogether.

Answer: A. She calls Lawyer Scout "an impudent coxcomb."

She says it in Joseph Andrews (Book IV, Chapter II), when Parson Adams tells her that Scout had advised him that a person who serves a year gains a settlement in the parish where he serves. That advice protects Joseph Andrews, so she dismisses it: Scout is an impudent coxcomb, and she will have no lawyer Scout interfere with her.

Why the others are wrong: B is the opposite of the truth — she is trying to prevent the marriage; C is wrong, she is the widow of Sir Thomas Booby; D is wrong, she is jealous of Fanny and has Scout describe her as "a poor dirty drab".

Answer: C. Tom Driscoll.

This is the last moment of the trial in Pudd'nhead Wilson. Wilson has just named him, in open court, in one sentence: the murderer of Judge Driscoll "sits in among you", and then — "Valet de Chambre, negro and slave, falsely called Thomas à Becket Driscoll, make upon the window the finger-prints that will hang you!" Tom collapses.

Why the others are wrong: Luigi and Angelo Capello had been cleared some minutes earlier; David Wilson is "the speaker" the fainting man turns towards.

Answer: D. "I saw no reason why I shouldn't take the young woman in for the night."

Sarah Stone was the widow of Church Lane, Stoniton, who sheltered Hetty Sorrel on the night the child was born, in Adam Bede, Chapter XLIII.

Why the others are wrong: A, the prisoner in a red cloak under a haystack near the stile, is John Olding's evidence, not hers — he was the labourer of Tedd's Hole who found the body; B and C are narrative or comment, not testimony from the box.

Answer: D. Corrupting the youth of Athens and not worshipping the gods of the city state.

Those were the two formal charges at his trial in 399 B.C., brought by Meletus, Anytus and Lycon: that he did not acknowledge the gods the city acknowledged and introduced new divinities of his own, and that he corrupted the young.

Why the others are wrong: sedition is the charge against Gandhi under Section 124A, and contempt of court belongs to the Denning material — both are on this syllabus, which is why they are offered as distractors.

Answer: A. The process of law by which people in high offices could be charged for misdemeanours.

Impeachment is a formal accusation brought against a holder of high office, tried not by an ordinary court but by a legislative body. In England the House of Commons impeached and the House of Lords tried, which is the procedure by which Warren Hastings was impeached in 1788.

Why the others are wrong: B describes the ordinary legislative process; C describes appointment; D describes resignation.

Answer: B. John Franting.

Franting is the victim in Arnold Bennett's short story "Murder!", killed by the poet Lomax Harder.

Why the others are wrong: Lomax Harder is his opposite in every particular — slight, mild and physically unimpressive; Dr Austin Bond is the detective; Arnold Bennett is the author.

Answer: D. In bad faith.

Mala fide is Latin for "in bad faith". Its opposite is bona fide, in good faith.

Why the others are wrong: manner is modus; a great work is magnum opus; mode of operation is modus operandi. All three are Latin phrases a law student meets, which is why they are offered here.

Answer: A. The journalist refused to answer the question of the judge.

Attorney-General v Mulholland and Foster [1963] 2 QB 477. Two journalists gave evidence before the Vassall Tribunal, an inquiry set up after an Admiralty clerk was convicted of spying. Asked to name the sources of statements they had published, they refused, and were committed for contempt of court.

Answer: A. Assertive.

An assertive or declarative sentence states something and ends with a full stop. This one states a fact about the morning.

Why the others are wrong: an interrogative sentence asks a question and ends with a question mark — "Is the morning beautiful?"; an imperative sentence gives a command or request, and its subject is usually understood — "Look at the morning"; an exclamatory sentence expresses sudden strong feeling and begins with what or how — "How beautiful the morning is!"

5. That Hetty "had taken her cloak and bonnet, but she'd left the basket and the things in it", and that she was frightened and angry.
6. That she did not report it, having no thought the girl meant harm, and not liking to set the constable after her, "for she'd a right to go from me if she liked."

Critical assessment.

• It is unanswerable, because she is identifying her own needlework. There is nothing in it for cross-examination to attack, and Hetty's counsel, who did cross-examine, got nothing.
• It supplies the element nothing else could: proof of a live birth and of the child in the prisoner's keeping. Joined to John Olding's discovery of the body under timber-choppings, it closes the chain.
• It also contains the defence's best point. Eliot records that the effect on Adam Bede was electrical: Hetty had taken the baby with her and left the basket, so her heart must have clung to it.
• It is devastating because it is kind. She is the one person in the novel who was good to Hetty, and hers is the evidence that convicts her. A witness on oath has no way to be kind.

Her defects as a judge. She is not a lawyer; she sits on a letter procured by her own side; she is the wife of the defendant's closest friend; she conceals her identity; she urges settlement before ruling; and she springs an alien statute after judgment on which the accused has had no notice. She also never takes the ground that was available all along — that a bond for a pound of a man's flesh is void as contrary to public policy, and needed no trick about blood to defeat it.

In a sentence: Portia is a brilliant advocate impersonating a judge, and her performance saves an innocent man by a method that would be set aside on appeal in any modern court.

The 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 mind and the body — and Bennett titles the story with one blunt word so that no reader can slide past what has happened by attending only to what the victim deserved.

For a law student. His character is his defence and his character is what convicts him. Provocation requires a sudden and temporary loss of self-control, and buying a weapon and preparing an explanation is the opposite of that. The question is never whether the deceased was a good man, but whether the accused has a defence.

Why he matters. He is poor, ridiculous and unbudgeable, and Fielding gives the comic figure the only unanswerable speech in the novel. A threat works only on a man who wants what is being threatened.

The comparison to make. Adams has no legal training and gets the law right and refuses to bend it, at the cost of his living. Lawyer Scout has no legal training either and sells whatever opinion is wanted. The difference between them is character, not qualification.

• The Court of Appeal, with Denning MR, discharged it — the litigation had been dormant for years, the matter was of grave public concern, and no trial was in prospect that could be prejudiced.
• The House of Lords restored it.
• Strasbourg reversed the position in The Sunday Times v United Kingdom (1979), holding the injunction a breach of Article 10.
• Parliament then changed the law: the Contempt of Court Act 1981 confined the strict liability rule to "active" proceedings, required a substantial risk of serious prejudice, and created a section 5 defence for good-faith discussion of public affairs.

Why it matters. It is the clearest illustration of a collision between two things the law values equally — a court's right to decide undisturbed, and a free press's right to discuss a public scandal. The deciding fact was delay: a sub judice rule with no time limit is a censorship rule. End on the 1981 Act, because the law now is not what the House of Lords held.

3. He said disaffection had become a virtue in the circumstances. He held it a virtue to be disaffected towards a Government which in its totality had done more harm to India than any previous system, and said that to preach disaffection towards the existing system had become almost a passion with him.
4. He traced how he came to it. He had begun as a supporter of the connection and had served in the Boer War, the Zulu rebellion and the Great War, believing India could gain "a status of full equality in the Empire." "The first shock came in the shape of the Rowlatt Act, a law designed to rob the people of all real freedom"; then came the agitation against it, and "the Punjab horrors."
5. He invited the maximum penalty, telling the judge that only two courses were open to him: to resign the office, or to inflict the severest penalty.

The point to end on. His argument distinguishes disaffection from incitement. He claims the right to say that a system is bad and deserves no loyalty, while accepting that nobody may urge violence — which is very close to the narrowing construction the Supreme Court later placed on the same section in Kedar Nath Singh v State of Bihar (1962), confining it to words tending to incite violence or public disorder.

3. He cross-examines Meletus and destroys the indictment. If he corrupts the young, who improves them? And the charge alleges both that he introduces new divinities and that he is a complete atheist — and both cannot be true. This part succeeds.
4. He refuses to plead in the customary way: no weeping, no children produced, no begging. A juror has sworn to judge according to law and must not be asked to make a present of justice.
5. He refuses the terms on which he could live. Asked why he cannot hold his tongue and live quietly in exile, he answers that this would be a disobedience to the God, and that "the unexamined life is not worth living."
6. He calls his poverty as his witness — he has taken no fees and neglected his affairs for thirty years.

The outcome and the assessment. Convicted by a narrow majority, he proposed as his counter-penalty maintenance in the Prytaneum, the honour given to Olympic victors, and the vote for death was heavier than the vote to convict. As advocacy the defence fails, and deliberately; as a defence of a life it succeeds completely — which is what he intended, since he told the court he was defending himself for their sake and not his own.

5. Sympathetically but without sentiment. He is given wit, resourcefulness and a certain gallantry, and the reader is allowed to like him.
6. As capable of change. An anthem heard outside a church restores his mother, roses, ambitions and clean thoughts, and he resolves to find work.
7. Through the closing irony. At that moment he is arrested for loitering and given three months. He obtains what he wanted only once he has stopped wanting it.

The comment to make. The presentation is comic on the surface and critical underneath, and the criticism falls on the law rather than on the man. Five or six real offences pass unnoticed; one motionless, harmless man outside a church at night is arrested for how he looks.

1. It was 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.
2. There was no urgency. The cylinder had been seized and the plan had failed; he could have been prosecuted in the ordinary way for the theft or an attempt. The summary power is for occasions when it is urgent and imperative to act immediately.
3. The sentence was excessive in any event. He had spent 14 days in prison and had apologised, which was enough "to purge his contempt, if contempt it was."

Why it matters. It marks the boundary of the most drastic power a judge holds. In a summary contempt the judge is the victim, the prosecutor and the tribunal at once — tolerable in an emergency and intolerable otherwise. Denning is not saying the conduct was harmless; he is saying it should have gone through the ordinary process, with a charge, a defence and a trial.

The appeal. 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 about 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 principle. A court must be able to protect the administration of justice, and the summary power exists for that purpose alone; but the sentence is a means and not an end. And, since Denning was notably sympathetic to the students' cause and to their youth: a good cause is not a licence to disrupt a court.

Set it beside Balogh. In Morris the contempt was in the face of the court and immediate action was necessary; in Balogh nothing happened in the court's presence and there was no urgency. The two together draw the line: the emergency power is for emergencies.