BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 History of Courts Solved Question Papers with Answers 2017 to 2026 - Mumbai University | munotes

History of Courts is really two subjects sharing one paper, and it helps enormously to see that before you start revising. The first is the history proper, running from the East India Company's charters of 1600 and 1661 through the Mayor's Courts, the Adalats of Warren Hastings, the Supreme Court at Calcutta and the Cornwallis Code, and stopping at the Indian High Courts Act of 1861. The second is modern constitutional and professional material: the writ jurisdiction under Articles 32 and 226, Article 141 and the doctrine of precedent, the Advocates Act 1961, the Law Commission, and the separation of the judiciary from the executive. Sections 1 and 2 of the paper mix the two freely, so a candidate who has read only the history will lose half the short questions.

The third section is the one you can prepare with real confidence, because it is the same handful of cases in sitting after sitting. Across the twenty papers solved here it draws on five: the trial of Raja Nandkumar in 1775, the Kamaluddin case, the Patna case of the widow Naderah Begum, the Cossijurah case, and the Swaroop Chand revenue case from Dacca. A sixth, Gorachand Dutt against the Murshidabad Provincial Council, turns up in the 2022-23 and 2023-24 ATKT papers. Learn those six properly, with facts, the issue, the decision and the consequence, and you have prepared an entire section of every paper in the subject.

One habit of the examiners is worth knowing in advance. The older papers name the case in the question, "the Patna case", "the trial of Raja Nand Kumar". The newer ones increasingly do not: they set out the facts and ask you to identify the case yourself. The stem that recurs most is some version of "the conflict between the Supreme Court and the Supreme Council reached the climax in this case", and that one is always Cossijurah. So revise these cases by their facts and not by their names, because the name is exactly what the paper may withhold.

Every one of those cases turns on the same defect, and saying so is what turns a retelling into an answer. The Regulating Act of 1773 gave the Supreme Court jurisdiction over His Majesty's subjects and over persons employed by the Company, and defined neither expression, and it never said whether the Court stood above the Governor-General in Council or beside him. Two authorities from two different sources, with no boundary drawn between them, is the whole story, and the Act of Settlement of 1781 is Parliament drawing the boundary afterwards. Almost every provision of that Act answers one of these cases directly.

The long questions repeat too, and about seven of them cover most of what has been set: the working of the Mayor's Court and its conflict with the Governor-in-Council, the dual system of courts between 1834 and 1861, the objectives of the Advocates Act 1961, the writ jurisdiction and the principles applied in adjudicating writs, the role of the Law Commission, the Rule of Law and its impact on Indian courts, and a comparison of the High Courts under the Government of India Act 1935 with the High Courts today. One name recurs across several of them: when a paper asks who pioneered the Rule of Law in India, or who overhauled the entire Adalat system, the answer expected is Lord Cornwallis, for the Code of 1793 that took judicial power from the revenue Collector and made the Government suable in its own courts.

Check which pattern you are sitting, because the arithmetic differs and the codes tell you which is which. Paper code 66833 is the 75 mark paper in two and a half hours, ending with three long answers of 13 marks. Codes 68113 and 68103 are the 60 mark paper in two hours, ending with two answers of 12 marks. Older papers look different again: up to 2019-20 this was a 100 mark paper written in three hours, with short notes worth 5 marks and four long answers of 12. The one real outlier is 2021-22, an online examination of twenty multiple choice questions carrying 30 marks in total, with no descriptive section at all.

These are model answers prepared by munotes. They are a study aid and not official University answer keys, which the University of Mumbai does not publish.