BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 1 English 1 2022-23 Question Paper with Solutions

The words are Dr B. R. Ambedkar's, from his broadcast "Why Indian Labour is Determined to Win This War", delivered from the Bombay station of All India Radio while he was Labour Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council.

The scheme referred to is parliamentary democracy as it had come to be practised: a form of government, in his words, in which the function of the people has come to be to vote for their masters and then leave them to rule. Labour, he says, regards that as a travesty of government by the people, and wants a government that is government by the people in name as well as in fact.

The speaker is Parson Abraham Adams, the curate, and the lines are from Book IV, Chapter II of Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews.

What he meant is a pun, and both halves must be given. Lady Booby has ordered him to publish the banns of Joseph and Fanny no more, and when he will not agree she threatens to recommend to "your master, the doctor" that he "discard you from his service" — that is, to have the rector who holds the living turn him out of his curacy and his livelihood. Adams answers that he does not know those terms in that sense, because he is in the service of a Master who will never discard him for doing his duty; and if the doctor turns him from his cure, God will provide him another.

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.

The context is her evidence. Having taken Hetty in and seen the child born in the night, Sarah Stone grew afraid the young mother was feverish and went out, about half past eight on a very dark night, to fetch an experienced woman. She left by the back door into the alley, leaving the prisoner sitting up by the fire in the kitchen. She was gone an hour and a half, and when she returned the candle was burning just as she had left it, and the prisoner and the baby were both gone.

Answer: He said that if they dealt fair with him and his party they would not regret it, but he warned them that if they tried any tricks, God alone could help them.

The changes made, and why:

Answer: Somebody has ruined my client's hopes and prospects.

In the context of the passage, the better answer is: Mr Pickwick has ruined my client's hopes and prospects.

The changes made:

1. The sentence is passive, so the conversion runs the other way: the subject my client's hopes and prospects becomes the object.
2. An agent must be supplied, because the passive has hidden it. Where none is named, use an indefinite subject such as somebody; where the context names one, use it.
3. The verb becomes has ruined: the state described is a present result of a completed act, so the present perfect is the natural active form.

4. Eloquent. The speech beginning "The quality of mercy is not strain'd" is not decoration: she offers Shylock a way out before she closes the trap.

5. Fair in form and merciless in effect. She confirms the bond, invites him three times to take the money, lets him refuse each offer on the record, and allows the case to run until Antonio's shirt is open and the knife is ready. Only then does she produce the reservation.

6. Firm about the rule of law. Begged by Bassanio to "wrest once the law to your authority; to do a great right, do a little wrong", she refuses: "It must not be. There is no power in Venice can alter a decree established."

7. Playful and resourceful. The ring trick that follows shows the same intelligence turned to comedy: she takes Bassanio's ring as her fee and afterwards convicts him of parting with it.

8. Constrained, for all her power. She is bound by her dead father's will to marry whichever suitor chooses the right casket, and can neither choose nor refuse.

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. Bennett establishes his physical dominance 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.

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.

Where the story comes from

Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam tells the story of Steven in his prescribed essay "The Joy of Reading", published in 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 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 separately in other sittings, is V. Kathiresan.

The pattern every one of these stories follows

Kalam narrates them to a fixed design, and the design is the substance of the answer. Elsewhere in the essay he sums up such a life in one sentence, which another sitting 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 apart and you have five stages:

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 he was reading newspapers, magazines and books, and encouraged him to study further. His duty ran from about ten to five, and he studied in the evenings: tenth standard, then higher secondary, then a B.A. in History and an M.A. in History from Madurai Kamaraj University. He became an assistant professor of History.

What Kalam concludes

1. Reading is a method, not a pastime. The ordinary hours of an ordinary week are enough, if used. 2. Access, not ability, separates readers from non-readers — which is why the same essay argues for home libraries. 3. One person's encouragement can be decisive, and Kalam presents that as a duty rather than a kindness. 4. The outcome is repeatable. A story about a great man proves that great men exist; a story about a driver proves what is available to a reader.

The music, the moonlight and the quiet street produce in him "a sudden and wonderful change". He sees with horror the pit into which he has fallen: the degraded days, the dead hopes, the wrecked faculties and the base motives that make up his existence. In an instant he resolves to pull himself out of the mire: he will find the man who once offered him work, be somebody in the world, conquer the evil that has taken him. Tomorrow he will go into the roaring downtown district and find work.

What follows

At that moment 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 gives him three months on the Island — precisely what he had spent the whole day 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 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.

I hold an LL.M. in Constitutional and Administrative Law from the University of Mumbai (2018) and a Ph.D. on the doctrine of legitimate expectation in Indian administrative law (2022). I qualified in the UGC-NET (Law) in 2018 and satisfy the qualifications prescribed by the Bar Council of India and the University Grants Commission for the post.

I have taught for four years at ____ Law College, Mumbai, where my subjects have been Constitutional Law, Administrative Law and Legal Method. 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.

Beyond teaching and research I have been closely involved in clinical legal education, having run a legal aid clinic for three years in association with the District Legal Services Authority, and I have served as a faculty adviser to a Moot Court Committee. Given this College's long tradition in both, I should welcome the opportunity to continue that work here.

Examination	University	Year	Result
Ph.D. (Law)	University of Mumbai	2022	Awarded
UGC-NET (Law)	UGC	2018	Qualified
LL.M. (Constitutional and Administrative Law)	University of Mumbai	2018	72%
B.L.S. LL.B.	University of Mumbai	2016	68%

Teaching experience: Assistant Professor (ad hoc), ____ Law College, Mumbai, 2019 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 with the District Legal Services Authority; faculty adviser, Moot Court Committee.
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.

A note on the question as printed. It reads "frequent supply of electricity", which is plainly a slip for infrequent supply — nobody complains of having too much electricity. Answer it as a complaint about irregular and interrupted supply, and do not waste a line pointing the error out.

Model answer

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

3 April 2023

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

Subject: Frequent interruption of electricity supply and non-working street lights, Ranade Road, Dadar (West)

Sir/Madam,

The consequences. About 120 families are affected. Lifts fail with residents inside them, and two elderly residents have been trapped; water pumps do not run, so the overhead tanks are not filled; and an unlit lane with an open feeder pillar in it is a danger to children and to anyone returning at night.

Steps already taken. Complaints were lodged with the supply company on 8 February 2023 (No. 44210) and 19 March 2023 (No. 47338), and a written representation was submitted at the ward office on 26 March 2023. No inspection has been carried out and no reply has been received.

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 Ranade 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.

Precis (about 150 words)

Gandhi regarded the Amritsar session as his real entrance into Congress politics; his attendance at earlier sessions had been little more than an annual renewal of allegiance, with no work cut out for him and none desired. Amritsar showed him that he had an aptitude the Congress could use. The senior leaders, pleased with his work on the Punjab inquiry, began inviting him to the informal gatherings at which the Subjects Committee's resolutions were framed, and to which only those in the leaders' confidence were called. Two tasks then engaged him, one being the memorial to the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, for which the Congress had resolved to raise about five lakhs and had made him a trustee. Since princely donations were out of the question, the collection fell chiefly on him. Bombay subscribed liberally and the trust stands in credit, but the country cannot agree what to build, the Hindus, Musalmans and Sikhs being now divided.

How the precis was made

1. The passage runs to about 330 words, so a little under half of it, about 150, is what the question asks for.

Model answer

Speech at the first meeting of the Cultural Committee

Respected Principal, respected faculty adviser Prof. ____, members of the Cultural Committee, and my dear friends.

Good afternoon to you all.

A word of thanks. I stand before you as your newly elected Secretary, and my first duty is the most pleasant one: to thank you for the confidence you have placed in me. I am grateful to the Principal and to our faculty adviser for their guidance, and to the outgoing Committee, whose work last year has left us a great deal to build on.

Third, accounts placed before this Committee after every event. The funds are the college's and the students', and they should be accounted for openly.

What I ask of you. Ideas, and hands. This Committee will be judged by what it puts on, not by what it plans, and there is a great deal of work between the two. My door and my telephone are open to any member of this college with a suggestion.

Let us make this a year the college remembers. Thank you.

The case

Bardell against Pickwick is the action for breach of promise of marriage tried in the Court of Common Pleas in Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers. Mrs Martha Bardell, a widow and Mr Pickwick's landlady in Goswell Street, claims £1,500. What had actually happened was that Mr Pickwick, at length and very clumsily, was telling her he intended to engage a manservant, Sam Weller; she understood him to be proposing marriage and fainted into his arms, in which posture his three friends discovered him. On that misunderstanding the attorneys Dodson and Fogg build an action.

Who is in the courtroom

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 and does his friend enormous harm.

4. Sam Weller, called for the defence: unshakeable, funny, and unable to prove anything, since he was in the passage and saw nothing.

Critical analysis

1. The action was manufactured, not discovered. Dodson and Fogg take the case on speculation, so that Mrs Bardell pays nothing unless she wins, and they say so to Mr Pickwick's face. Sam Weller gets that fact into evidence in cross-examination, by reporting that the ladies at Mrs Bardell's had admired the attorneys for taking the case on spec and charging nothing unless they got it out of Mr Pickwick. Dodson and Fogg turn red, and Buzfuz abandons his own witness.

2. Advocacy replaces evidence. Buzfuz's opening is a masterpiece of its kind: a desolate widow, a home broken up, chops and tomato sauce as the language of a deliberate seducer. There is no evidence of a promise at all, and the speech exists to make the jury forget that they have been asked for one.

6. The verdict and its aftermath. The jury finds for the plaintiff with £750. Mr Pickwick refuses to pay a farthing and is committed to the Fleet Prison. There he finds Mrs Bardell, arrested by her own attorneys for their costs when the damages could not be got out of him, and he pays for her release. The lawyers are the only people who profit.

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.

3. Ownership of the weapon. The Indian dagger was their own property, brought from abroad, shown about the town, and advertised as stolen with a reward, in terms that matched it exactly.

4. Motive: an established quarrel. 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.

5. Opportunity. They were in the house, at night, at the moment of the killing, with nobody else accounted for.

6. Two independent witnesses. Mrs Pratt, the Judge's sister, woke to running footsteps and found the accused standing over her murdered brother; Mr Rogers and Mr Buckstone came in behind her and gave confirmatory evidence.

7. Character and prejudice. They were foreigners in a small Southern town, mysterious in their origins, and the community was disposed to believe the worst. This is not evidence at all, but it operates as if it were.

8. No alternative suspect. Nobody else was seen; the household was asleep; and on the material available before Wilson's demonstration there was no other candidate.

How the circumstantial case was destroyed

Wilson does not attack the honesty of any witness. He accepts everything they say and finds one fact none of them noticed: the bloody thumb-print the murderer left on the handle. He explains that fingerprints are unique and unchanging — a "natal autograph" — and then proves the method in the room, having jurors make prints and identifying each from his slides, before comparing the disputed print. It matches neither twin, and it matches Tom Driscoll, sitting in the courtroom.

Conclusion

There was more than enough circumstantial evidence to convict the twins, and in any court without Pudd'nhead Wilson in it they would have been convicted: presence, possession, ownership, motive, opportunity, two eyewitnesses to the scene and the settled opinion of the town. What the novel demonstrates is that a complete circumstantial case is still an inference, and an inference can be wholly reasonable and wholly wrong. One physical fact, testable by the court itself, displaced the whole of it.

Lomax Harder

1. Deliberate. He goes to a shop, buys a revolver, invents a plausible reason for the purchase, and goes to find Franting. Every step is prepared.

2. Emotionally deep and outwardly controlled. His feeling for Emily is genuine and unspoken; his hatred of Franting is not temper but judgment.

3. Composed after the act, with great presence of mind, and he very nearly escapes altogether.

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

2. The contrast attacks a real prejudice. The assumption under examination is that violence belongs to violent-looking people. Bennett shows a gentle, educated man commit a premeditated killing and very nearly walk away from it, precisely because he does not look the part.

3. Neither man is a moral simplification. Franting's brutality is real and explains the crime; Harder's refinement is real and does not excuse it. Bennett refuses to let either quality do the reader's judging.

4. The victim's own quality supplies the evidence. Franting is left-handed, which made him formidable in the ring, and it is physical detail of exactly that kind that unravels the crime.

Conclusion

The two men are a single design in two halves. Franting exists to make the killing intelligible and Harder to make it inexcusable, and Bennett balances them so finely that a reader who sympathises with the murderer and a reader who is appalled by him can both point to the text. That balance, rather than the plot, is what the story is for.

3. He is abused in open court and never protected. Gratiano calls him a "damn'd, inexecrable dog" and tells him his desires are "wolvish, bloody, starv'd and ravenous", and the court does not once call him to order.

4. Antonio's conduct is admitted, not denied. On Shylock's uncontradicted account Antonio has spat upon his gaberdine, called him dog, and voided his rheum upon his beard on the Rialto. Asked to lend to such a man, Shylock puts the question: shall he say, "Hath a dog money?" Antonio answers: "I am as like to call thee so again, to spit on thee again, to spurn thee too."

5. His occupation was forced on him. Jews were barred from most trades, and lending at interest was forbidden to Christians and left to them. Antonio then "lends out money gratis and brings down the rate of usance", attacking the one trade Shylock is permitted.

6. His daughter is taken with the help of Antonio's circle, along with his money and the turquoise ring that had been his wife's, which he says he would not have given for a wilderness of monkeys.

4. He lets the Christians behave, at the moment of victory, exactly as Shylock predicted. They abuse a defeated man, strip him of his property and require him to change his faith. "The villainy you teach me I will execute" is confirmed within a hundred lines by the people who taught it.

The honest qualification

An answer that presents Shylock only as a victim will be marked down, and rightly. The bond is a contract for a man's life; he refuses three thousand ducats, then six, then thrice the sum; he whets his knife on the sole of his shoe in open court and brings scales to weigh the flesh; and asked why, he can give no reason but that it is his "humour". Being wronged explains a man's hatred; it does not make that instrument anything other than monstrous.

Conclusion

Shakespeare's portrayal is neither an endorsement of prejudice nor an exoneration of Shylock. He stages the prejudice fully, gives its victim the language to indict it, gives him also the worst intention in the play, and declines to tell the audience what to conclude. The play does not say the trial was unjust; it shows us the trial and leaves the judgment to us.

What Lady Booby wants

Joseph Andrews, the footman who refused her, intends to marry Fanny Goodwill and settle in her parish. That morning she has failed with Parson Adams, who would not stop publishing the banns and told her, correctly, that 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 (Book IV, Chapter III).

The strategy, step by step

1. He reverses his own legal opinion. Having told Adams that a person who serves a year gains a settlement, he now produces a chain of reasoning 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; therefore the banns ought not to be published. He covers the change smoothly: what he told Mr Adams was "on a supposition that he was settled in fact."

2. He flatters the client's real motive while dressing it as public interest. He agrees that the parish has too many poor already and volunteers that "we ought to have an act to hang or transport half of them."

7. He praises the magistrate for exactly the wrong reason, saying it is a blessing to the country that Frolick is in the commission because he has "taken several poor off our hands that the law would never lay hold on", and describing with relish how a man committed to Bridewell is "either starved or eat up by vermin in a month's time".

8. He promises to stretch the law where it does not reach. Asked to be rid of Fanny too, he admits the law is "a little deficient in giving us any such power of prevention", but adds that "the justice will stretch it as far as he is able, to oblige your ladyship."

9. He assumes Adams can be bought. He supposes the parson's only objection is losing his fee, and undertakes that "that being once made easy", the objection will disappear. He cannot conceive of a scruple that is not a price.

10. He executes. Joseph and Fanny are afterwards taken before Justice Frolick on a charge of cutting a hazel twig from a hedge, valued at threepence, and are committed. The charge is fabricated; the committal is real.

Assessment of the strategy

As a piece of practice it is effective, and that is what makes it frightening.

Conclusion

Scout's strategy is to supply legal colour to a private malice — to find the form of law that will deliver what his client wants, and to procure a magistrate who will not look behind it. Fielding's phrase for such men is exact: they are "the pests of society, and a scandal to a profession to which they do not belong." But the deeper target is the arrangement that made Scout useful: a magistracy that committed on a name, and a settlement law that could be aimed at anybody without means.