BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 Sociology 2024-25 Question Paper with Solutions

Status is the position a person occupies in a social system, carrying rights, duties and a place in the scale of prestige.

Ascribed status is assigned at birth or acquired involuntarily, without regard to ability or effort, and generally cannot be changed: sex, age, caste, race, kinship position, hereditary title.

Achieved status is earned through effort, ability, choice or competition: advocate, graduate, husband, trade union leader, convicted offender.

The distinction is Ralph Linton's. Traditional societies rest mainly on ascription, modern industrial societies mainly on achievement, though no society uses one alone.

Communication is the process by which meaning is transmitted from one person to another, and it is the mechanism by which all social interaction takes place.

Verbal communication uses words, spoken or written: conversation, speeches, letters, statutes, judgments.

Non verbal communication transmits meaning without words: facial expression, gesture, posture, eye contact, tone and pitch of voice, touch, physical distance, dress, and silence. It also includes paralanguage, the features of speech other than its words, such as emphasis and pause.

Non verbal communication is generally less consciously controlled than speech, and is therefore often a more reliable indicator of what a person actually feels.

The Jajmani system was the traditional Indian village arrangement in which families of different castes rendered hereditary services to one another in exchange for payment in kind, chiefly a customary share of the harvest.

The jajman is the patron, usually a landowning cultivating family; the kamin or praja is the serving family, drawn from the artisan and service castes: carpenter, blacksmith, potter, barber, washerman, priest, water carrier and sweeper.

Its features were that the relationship was hereditary on both sides, not contractual, since neither party chose the other, paid in kind by customary entitlement rather than by wage, and caste based, since the service was fixed by birth.

Crime is an act or omission forbidden by law and punishable by the state. Its causes are studied by criminology, and they are classified as follows:

1. Biological, in the discredited tradition of Lombroso, who claimed the criminal is a distinct physical type; now largely abandoned.
2. Psychological: personality disorder, mental illness, and defective emotional development.
3. Economic: poverty, unemployment, inequality and the desire for gain, which produces both crimes of need and crimes of greed.
4. Social: faulty socialisation and broken families; the influence of delinquent companions, which is Sutherland's differential association; urbanisation and anonymity; migration; and the weakening of primary group control.
5. Cultural: the gap between prescribed goals and available means, which is Merton's strain, and the normlessness Durkheim called anomie.

Status is the position a person occupies in a social system, carrying rights, duties and a place in the scale of prestige. Role is the behaviour expected of the person occupying that status.

Linton's formulation is the standard one: "A role is the dynamic aspect of a status. When the individual puts the rights and duties which constitute the status into effect, he is performing a role."

Status is what a person is; role is what a person does. The two are inseparable: there is no status without a role and no role without a status.

Related concepts: status set, the collection of statuses held at one time; role set, the several relationships attached to one status; role conflict, incompatible demands from two statuses; and role strain, incompatible demands within one role.

For full marks, cover: the meaning, the characteristics of a profession, the structure and internal stratification of the Indian bar, its functions, its problems, its regulation, and the sociological frame that makes sense of it.

Meaning. The sociology of the legal profession studies lawyers as an occupational group: how the profession is organised, how entry is controlled, how it is stratified internally, what functions it performs for society, how it is regulated, and how it relates to power and to social change.

Characteristics of a profession. A specialised body of theoretical knowledge acquired by long formal training; a licence to practise and a monopoly over the work; a code of ethics and self regulation; an ideal of service in preference to profit; autonomy in the exercise of judgment; and an association that represents the members and disciplines them.

Functions. Representation of parties and access to justice; advice and the prevention of disputes; drafting and the ordering of transactions; social engineering, in Roscoe Pound's phrase, since lawyers shape law through argument; public interest litigation, through which the Indian bar extended rights to groups with no other access; supplying the personnel of the judiciary, the legislature and public life; and legal aid under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987.

Problems. Enormous pendency and delay; the cost of litigation, which excludes the poor and makes the promise of Article 39A partly formal; unequal access, with competent counsel concentrated in the metros; the quality and regulation of legal education, with a very large number of poorly supervised institutions; strikes and boycotts by lawyers, held illegal in Ex-Capt. Harish Uppal v. Union of India (2003); touting and unethical practice; gender disparity, with few women in the senior bar and on the bench; and the tension between the service ideal and commercialisation.

Regulation. The Advocates Act, 1961; the Bar Council of India Rules on professional conduct and etiquette; disciplinary proceedings under Section 35 for professional misconduct; and the contempt jurisdiction.

5. Consequential, determining life chances: health, longevity, education, occupation and income.
6. Legitimated by belief: karma and ritual purity for caste, divine right and blood for estate, merit for class.
7. Persistent, since the advantages of position are transmitted to children.

Forms. Caste, closed and ascribed, ranked by ritual purity; class, relatively open and largely achieved, ranked by wealth and market position; estate, the legally defined orders of feudal Europe; and slavery.

Theories.

1. Functional (Davis and Moore). Some positions are functionally more important and require scarce talent and long training; unequal rewards are necessary to induce the ablest to fill them. Criticism (Tumin): it assumes the most rewarded positions are the most important, ignores that access to training is itself unequal so most talent is never discovered, and justifies inequality rather than explaining it.

Social mobility. Horizontal, movement without change of rank, and vertical, ascending or descending; individual and collective; intragenerational and intergenerational. Its channels, in Sorokin's terms, are education above all, occupation, migration, political organisation, marriage and the accumulation of wealth.

Sources of power. Force and coercion; wealth and control of resources; knowledge and expertise; numbers and organisation; office; and personal qualities.

Types of power. Coercive, resting on the threat of punishment; remunerative, resting on reward; and normative, resting on shared values, which is Etzioni's classification. Also legitimate and illegitimate, and personal and positional.

Weber's three types of authority, distinguished by the ground of legitimacy:

1. Traditional authority. Legitimated by the sanctity of immemorial custom: this is how it has always been. The person commands because he occupies a position sanctified by tradition, and obedience is owed to the person, not to a rule. Examples: a hereditary monarch, a caste elder, a patriarch, a khap panchayat. Its administrative forms are patrimonialism and feudalism, in which officials are personal retainers rather than salaried functionaries.

For full marks, cover: the definition and characteristics, the classification into associative and dissociative processes, each process in detail with its forms, the Park and Burgess sequence, and the significance of the concept.

Definition. A social process is a repeated form of social interaction through which people relate to one another and through which social relationships are established, maintained or altered.

MacIver and Page: "Social process is the manner in which the relations of the members of a group, once brought together, acquire a distinctive character."

Characteristics. It is continuous and ongoing; it involves interaction between two or more persons; it produces a change in relationships; it is patterned, recurring in recognisable forms; and it is universal.

Classification. Social processes are associative or integrative, drawing people together, and dissociative or disintegrative, driving them apart.

3. Assimilation. The slow fusion of two or more groups into one culture, so that the differences between them disappear and a new common identity is formed. It is largely unconscious and gradual. Its favouring conditions are close and prolonged contact, intermarriage, cultural similarity, a shared language, equal status between the groups, and the absence of prejudice and physical distinctiveness. Segregation is the most effective obstacle to it.

4. Acculturation, the change produced in a culture by prolonged contact with another, and integration, the fitting together of parts into a whole, are usually added.

B. Dissociative processes

1. Competition. The impersonal, unconscious and continuous struggle for a reward that is scarce, in which the aim is the reward rather than injury to the rival. Its forms are economic, social, political, cultural and racial; and it is personal, where the rivals know one another, or impersonal, where they do not.

Significance. The concept allows a sociologist to describe how relationships actually work rather than merely listing the groups that exist. It is the vocabulary in which group relations, industrial relations, communal relations and international relations are all analysed.

(a) Importance of social media

Social media are the internet based platforms that allow users to create and share content and to participate in networks: messaging services, microblogging, video sharing and networking sites. What distinguishes them from older mass media is that communication is many to many rather than one to many, so every user is also a publisher.

Its importance:

1. Democratisation of publication. Anyone with a phone can reach an audience without the permission of an editor or the capital to own a press. This is the single largest change it has made.
2. Political mobilisation and campaigning, which is the setting of the question. Parties reach voters directly, target messages by constituency and demographic, raise funds, organise volunteers and respond to opponents within minutes.

2. Political participation, particularly among the young, and higher awareness during elections.
3. Community formation across geography, including support networks for the isolated.
4. Educational access and skill development.
5. Economic opportunity for small enterprises and individuals.
6. Rapid mobilisation for relief in disasters, which has repeatedly outperformed official channels in the first hours.

Negative.

1. Misinformation and fake news, which spread faster than correction can follow. This is most dangerous during elections and communal tension, and the forwarding of unverified atrocity claims has directly produced mob lynching.
2. Polarisation and echo chambers. Recommendation algorithms show people more of what they already agree with, so opinion hardens and exposure to disagreement falls. Extreme content is rewarded because it holds attention.
3. Hate speech and communal mobilisation, with a direct connection to riot escalation.

Regulation in India. Article 19(1)(a) protects speech and Article 19(2) permits reasonable restriction. The Information Technology Act, 2000, with the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules, 2021, imposing due diligence, grievance officers and a three tier redressal mechanism; the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, requiring verifiable parental consent for children's data and prohibiting targeted advertising to them; the Representation of the People Act, 1951, and the Election Commission's Model Code of Conduct, extended to social media, with the 48 hour silence period before polling; and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, on offences relating to enmity between groups. Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) struck down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act as unconstitutionally vague and read down the intermediary takedown provision, and it remains the governing authority on online speech.

4. Showing pornography;
5. Any other unwelcome physical, verbal or non verbal conduct of a sexual nature.

Section 3(2) adds circumstances which, if they occur in relation to any act of sexual harassment, may amount to it: an implied or explicit promise of preferential treatment; a threat of detrimental treatment; a threat about present or future employment status; interference with work or the creation of an intimidating, offensive or hostile work environment; and humiliating treatment likely to affect health or safety.

The two recognised forms. Quid pro quo harassment, where a benefit or a detriment at work is made to depend on submission; and hostile work environment harassment, where the conduct makes the workplace intimidating or offensive even though nothing is demanded in exchange.

• A written complaint may be made under Section 9, ordinarily within three months of the incident, extendable by a further three months for sufficient cause. The Committee may assist her in reducing it to writing.
• Section 10 permits conciliation at her request, but monetary settlement cannot be the basis of it, and it is optional.
• Section 12 allows interim relief during the inquiry: transfer of either party, leave of up to three months in addition to her ordinary entitlement, or restraint on the respondent from reporting on her work.
• The inquiry must be completed within 90 days, and the employer must act on the recommendation within 60 days. Reliefs include a written apology, warning, withholding of promotion or increment, termination, counselling, and deduction from salary as compensation to the complainant under Section 15.
• Confidentiality is protected by Section 16, and Section 19 places duties on the employer, including to provide a safe environment, display the penal consequences, organise awareness programmes and assist a complainant who wishes to file a criminal case.

2. Criminal proceedings. The 2013 Act does not displace criminal law, and she may pursue both.

3. Civil and other remedies. A civil suit for damages; a writ petition under Article 226 or Article 32 where a public employer fails to act; a complaint to the National or State Commission for Women; and free legal aid under the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987.

4. Protection against retaliation. Any adverse action taken because she has complained is itself actionable, and the Act treats victimisation as misconduct.

The background. The regime originates in Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan (1997), in which the Supreme Court, finding a legislative vacuum, laid down binding guidelines under Article 32, treating sexual harassment as a violation of Articles 14, 15, 19(1)(g) and 21. The Vishaka guidelines governed for sixteen years until the 2013 Act was enacted.

3. Transmission of the social heritage: socialisation, passing on values and culture. Media is now a fourth agency of socialisation alongside family, school and peer group.
4. Entertainment, which also relieves tension and creates shared experience.

Further roles relevant to the situation in the question:

1. Agenda setting: deciding which issues the public attends to.
2. Forum for debate and the formation of public opinion, which is the media's democratic justification.
3. Accountability, which is why the press is called the fourth estate.
4. Social change, since campaigns on sanitation, immunisation and girls' education work through it.

(b) How mass media influences public opinion

Public opinion is the collective view of a community on a matter of general concern. Cooley treated it not as a sum of individual opinions but as an organic product of communication and discussion.

The mechanisms of influence:

6. Two step flow. Lazarsfeld and Katz found that influence passes through opinion leaders in a person's primary group, who consume media and interpret it for others, which is why a rumour forwarded by a relative is far more persuasive than the same claim on an open platform.
7. The spiral of silence. Noelle Neumann's finding that people who believe their view is in the minority tend to keep quiet, which makes the apparent majority look larger than it is and silences dissent further.
8. Emotional appeal and imagery, which are processed faster and remembered longer than argument.
9. Repetition by algorithm, which shows each person more of what they already accept, producing echo chambers and hardening opinion.

Trial by media, which the question is really about

The situation described is trial by media: the pronouncement of guilt by publicity before, or during, a trial.

Why it is objectionable.

• It violates the presumption of innocence, a component of the fair trial guarantee under Article 21.

The legal position. Article 19(1)(a) protects the freedom of the press, and Article 19(2) permits reasonable restrictions in relation to contempt of court and defamation. The Contempt of Courts Act, 1971, punishes publication that prejudices or interferes with the course of justice. In Sahara India Real Estate Corporation v. SEBI (2012) the Supreme Court recognised the power to grant a postponement order deferring publication where there is a real and substantial risk of prejudice to a fair trial, treating it as a proportionate device rather than a prior restraint. The Programme Code under the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995, and the Press Council's norms of journalistic conduct also apply. Against this stands the equally important proposition, in Naresh Shridhar Mirajkar and after, that open justice is itself a constitutional value and that secrecy is a greater danger than publicity.

4. No legal or ritual barriers to marriage, eating together or occupation, unlike caste.
5. A distinct style of life, in dress, speech, housing, schooling and consumption.
6. Class consciousness, which varies greatly in intensity and is weak in India.
7. Indefinite boundaries, shading into one another.

The classification is commonly upper, middle and lower, each subdivided, following Warner's six class scheme; Marx's is bourgeoisie and proletariat.

Its consequence, which is the point of the question. Class determines life chances, and the clearest instance is education. A child's access to schooling, to books, to tuition, to a language of instruction and to the expectation of continuing is determined by the class position of the parents. Class therefore reproduces itself through education while appearing to reward merit.

(b) What can be done to help students from lower social classes

1. Legal and constitutional entitlement.

• Scholarships and fee waivers: pre matric and post matric scholarships for SC, ST and OBC students, means based merit scholarships, and the National Scholarship Portal.
• Direct benefit transfers for education related expenses, which reduce leakage.

3. Removing the indirect and opportunity costs.

• The Mid Day Meal scheme, now PM POSHAN, which addresses hunger and, by doing so, raises attendance and retention. It is the single most effective enrolment intervention in Indian education.
• Residential schools and hostels, including Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas and Eklavya Model Residential Schools for tribal children.
• Conditional cash transfers to compensate families for the earnings a child would otherwise bring in, which is the real reason many poor children leave school.
• Enforcement of the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, as amended in 2016.

4. Improving the quality of what is offered.

• Adequate teachers, infrastructure, drinking water and separate functioning toilets for girls, the absence of which is a measurable cause of dropout at puberty.

The received answer, from the utilitarians and from Spencer, was that modern society is held together by contract and self interest. Durkheim rejected this. Contract cannot be the basis of social order, he argued, because every contract presupposes a non contractual element: rules about what may be agreed, what makes agreement binding, and what remedies follow breach, none of which the parties themselves created. Society is prior to contract, not produced by it.

His answer was that the division of labour, far from being merely an economic fact, is a moral phenomenon: it produces a new form of social solidarity.

The two types of solidarity

1. Mechanical solidarity, characteristic of simple, small, traditional societies.

• Its basis is likeness. Individuals resemble one another, do similar work, hold similar beliefs and share similar experiences.
• The binding force is the collective conscience, which Durkheim defined as "the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same society", which forms a determinate system with a life of its own. In such societies it is strong, extensive, rigid and religious in character.

Law as the visible index of solidarity

Durkheim needed to measure solidarity, which cannot be observed directly, and his solution is his most important contribution for a law student: law is the visible symbol of solidarity, because every stable social bond eventually becomes a legal rule. He therefore classified law and read solidarity off it.

• Repressive law corresponds to mechanical solidarity. It punishes. An offence is felt as an assault on the shared conscience, and the reaction is passionate and collective. The criminal law is its type, and Durkheim's point about punishment follows: its function is not primarily to deter or to reform the offender but to reaffirm the collective conscience and reassure the law abiding that their common values still stand.
• Restitutive law corresponds to organic solidarity. It does not punish but restores: it puts the parties back where they were, by damages, specific performance, restitution or injunction. Contract, tort, commercial, procedural and administrative law are its types, and their growth is the measure of a differentiated society.

The proportion of repressive to restitutive law in a legal system therefore tells you what kind of society produced it.

2. It increases productive capacity and skill, which he treated as a secondary consequence rather than the cause.
3. It develops individual personality, since a differentiated society requires and rewards difference.
4. It generates moral rules governing the relations between specialised functions, of which professional ethics and labour law are examples.

The abnormal or pathological forms

Durkheim was not a simple optimist about specialisation, and the third part of his book is devoted to its failures. He identified three abnormal forms, which arise where the division of labour develops without adequate moral regulation.

Anomie

Because it recurs throughout Durkheim's work, anomie deserves separate statement. It is the condition in which the norms regulating desire lose their authority, so that people no longer know what they may legitimately want or how they may legitimately obtain it. Human desires, Durkheim held, are naturally unlimited, and only society can set a limit to them; when that limiting authority fails, desire becomes infinite and therefore permanently unsatisfiable, and the result is discontent, disorder and, in Suicide, anomic suicide. He found anomie in periods of sudden prosperity as well as sudden depression, since it is the abruptness of the change rather than its direction that unsettles the norms.

Assessment

Contributions. He established that the division of labour is a moral and social fact and not merely an economic one; he supplied the mechanical and organic solidarity distinction, which remains the standard account of modernisation; he made law an empirical index of social structure, founding the sociology of law; he introduced anomie, one of the discipline's most productive concepts; and in the forced division of labour he provided a sociological argument against inherited privilege.

For full marks, cover: Marx's place and method, dialectical and historical materialism, base and superstructure, the modes of production, class and class struggle, surplus value and exploitation, alienation, class consciousness and false consciousness, the prediction of revolution, the criticisms, and the later development of conflict theory.

Place and method

Karl Marx (1818 to 1883), German philosopher, economist and revolutionary, is with Durkheim and Weber one of the three founders of modern sociology, though he never described himself as a sociologist. Principal works: The Communist Manifesto (1848, with Engels), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and Das Kapital (1867).

1. Dialectical materialism. Marx took Hegel's dialectic, the movement of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, in which every state of affairs generates its own contradiction and both are resolved in a new state, and applied it not to ideas but to material conditions. He said he found Hegel standing on his head and set him on his feet.

Change occurs when the forces of production develop beyond what the existing relations of production can accommodate. The contradiction becomes intolerable, the relations are burst apart, and a new mode of production emerges: "at a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production... then begins an era of social revolution."

Modes of production and the stages of history

1. Primitive communism: no private property, no classes, communal ownership.
2. Ancient or slave society: master and slave.
3. Feudalism: lord and serf.
4. Capitalism: bourgeoisie and proletariat.
5. Socialism: the transitional stage, with social ownership and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
6. Communism: a classless, stateless society, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".

Class and class struggle

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

Surplus value and exploitation

Marx's economic demonstration of exploitation runs as follows. The value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. The worker sells his labour power for a wage equal to what it costs to keep him alive and reproduce his kind. But labour power, once purchased, produces more value than it costs: a worker paid the equivalent of four hours' subsistence may work eight. The difference, surplus value, is appropriated by the capitalist and is the source of profit.

Exploitation is therefore built into the wage relation itself, not a deviation from it, and it persists however humanely any individual employer behaves.

Alienation

Under capitalism the worker is estranged in four ways:

1. From the product of his labour, which belongs to another and confronts him as an alien thing.
2. From the act of production, which is imposed, monotonous and offers no satisfaction, so that the worker is at home only when he is not working.

Law performs the same function in Marx's account. It presents rules serving particular interests as general and impartial: the freedom of contract that makes employer and worker formally equal conceals a relation in which one may walk away and the other must eat.

Polarisation and revolution

Marx predicted: concentration of capital in fewer hands; the disappearance of intermediate classes, squeezed into the proletariat, which is polarisation; increasing misery of the proletariat; the growth of class consciousness under factory conditions that assemble workers in large numbers; the organisation of the proletariat; and finally revolution, the seizure of the means of production, a transitional dictatorship of the proletariat, and a classless society in which the state, having no class function left to perform, "withers away".

Criticisms

1. Economic determinism: the reduction of law, religion, politics and culture to reflections of the economy is too simple, and Engels himself conceded that the superstructure has some autonomy.
2. Polarisation did not occur. The middle classes expanded rather than disappearing, as managerial, professional, technical and service occupations multiplied.

• Lewis Coser argued the functions of conflict: it clarifies boundaries, strengthens the internal cohesion of each side, releases accumulated tension and generates new rules.
• C. Wright Mills described a power elite drawn from business, the military and the political executive.
• Antonio Gramsci replaced crude false consciousness with hegemony: the dominant class rules less by force than by securing consent to its worldview through civil society, education, media and religion.

Growth, and why

Single parent households are increasing in India, and the causes are the same social changes that altered the family generally: rising divorce, made socially survivable by female education and employment; the shift from joint to nuclear households, which removes the relatives who formerly absorbed a widowed or deserted parent; urbanisation and migration; the growing acceptability of single adoption; and greater willingness to leave an abusive marriage now that the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, offers residence and maintenance orders.

Two qualifications should be stated. First, single parent households are overwhelmingly headed by women, and the challenges below fall very unequally on the two sexes. Second, the phenomenon is not new in India; what is new is that it now arises from divorce and choice as well as from widowhood.

The challenges

1. Economic challenges, which are the foundation of most of the others.

• A single income supporting a whole household, with no second earner to absorb shocks.

• Social exclusion: exclusion from family functions, and the treatment of a single woman as a suspicious presence in a neighbourhood.
• Difficulty in renting accommodation, where landlords in Indian cities routinely refuse single women with children.
• Intrusive questioning and moral scrutiny, particularly of the mother's conduct.
• Loss of the affinal kin network on separation, so that the support system disappears at the moment it is most needed.
• Blame directed at the parent for the child's every difficulty, which is levelled at single mothers far more than at single fathers.

3. Psychological and emotional challenges.

• Loneliness and the absence of a partner to share decisions and anxieties.
• Role overload and role strain: performing both the instrumental and the expressive roles that Parsons described as divided between two parents.
• Chronic stress, guilt and anxiety about the child's future.

• Custody and guardianship disputes, under the Guardians and Wards Act, 1890, and the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, 1956, with the welfare of the child as the paramount consideration.
• The guardianship question for the unmarried mother, resolved in ABC v. State (NCT of Delhi) (2015), where the Supreme Court held that an unmarried mother may be appointed guardian without notice to the putative father and may obtain a birth certificate on her own affidavit.
• Inheritance and property, particularly the denial of a widow's share by her husband's relatives, despite the Hindu Succession Act, 1956.
• Documentation, the standing practical obstacle: school admissions, passports and government forms that require the father's name.
• Cost and delay in litigation, which fall hardest on a household with one income.

6. Institutional challenges.

• Forms, schools and workplaces built on the assumption of a two parent household.

The necessary qualification is that research consistently finds that the harm associated with single parent households is caused principally by poverty, conflict and instability rather than by the number of parents as such. A child in a stable single parent household does better than a child in a two parent household characterised by violence or open hostility. The relevant variables are income, the quality of parenting and the absence of conflict, not the head count. An answer that reports the risks without this qualification is repeating a prejudice rather than a finding.

Support in law and policy

Constitutional and legislative: Articles 14, 15(3), 21 and 39; maintenance under Section 144 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, and the personal laws; the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, with residence, monetary and custody orders; the Guardians and Wards Act, 1890; the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017; the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, and CARA regulations permitting single person adoption; and ABC v. State (NCT of Delhi) (2015) on guardianship.

For full marks, cover: Comte's life and context, why he is called the father of sociology, positivism, the Law of Three Stages, the hierarchy of the sciences, social statics and dynamics, his methods, the Religion of Humanity, his influence, and a critical assessment.

Life and context

Auguste Comte (1798 to 1857), French philosopher, wrote in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, in a France where the old order of monarchy, aristocracy and church had been destroyed and nothing settled had replaced it. His whole enterprise answers one question: on what basis can social order be reconstructed once religion no longer commands universal assent? His major works are the Course of Positive Philosophy in six volumes (1830 to 1842) and the System of Positive Polity (1851 to 1854). He was for a time secretary to Saint-Simon, whose influence on him was considerable and whose ideas he was later accused of appropriating.

Why he is called the father of sociology

Its consequences for sociology: the subject must be empirical, its propositions verifiable, its conclusions provisional, and its purpose practical, since knowledge of social laws permits prediction and therefore intelligent policy.

2. The Law of Three Stages

Comte's central proposition, which he regarded as his greatest discovery. Human thought, and with it society, passes through three successive stages, and the law applies at three levels: to the history of humanity, to the development of each individual mind, and to the growth of each science.

The theological or fictitious stage. Phenomena are explained by the will of supernatural beings. Three sub stages: fetishism, in which objects are held to possess life; polytheism, in which many gods govern departments of nature; monotheism, in which one god governs all. Socially: dominance of priests and military rulers, the family as the social unit, and authority resting on divine sanction.

4. Social statics and social dynamics

Social statics studies the conditions of order: the structure of society, its institutions, and how its parts hold together. Comte treated the family as its basic unit and consensus universalis, a fundamental agreement of beliefs and sentiments, as the binding force. Society, he held, is an organic whole whose parts are interdependent, an idea that passes directly into Durkheim's collective conscience and into functionalism.

Social dynamics studies progress, the laws of change and development, and the Law of Three Stages belongs here.

His pairing of the two, order and progress, appears on the flag of Brazil, placed there by his followers.

5. Methods

Comte prescribed four: observation, guided by theory, since facts without a hypothesis are unintelligible; experiment, understood not as laboratory manipulation but as the study of pathological cases, in which a disturbance reveals the normal working of a system; comparison, of societies, of classes, and of human with animal societies; and the historical method, which he regarded as the method proper to sociology, since social phenomena can be understood only in their development.

Critical assessment

Achievements. He founded and named the discipline; established that society can be studied scientifically; supplied its first systematic method; gave it the ambition of guiding policy by evidence; and framed the questions, order and progress, that its founders spent the next century answering.

Criticisms.

1. The Law of Three Stages is unhistorical: the three modes of thought coexist rather than succeeding one another. A working scientist may pray, and a modern state rests on both a constitution built of abstract rights, which is metaphysical, and an administration built on statistics, which is positive.
2. It is unilinear and Eurocentric, assuming a single universal path with Comte's own society at the summit.
3. He overestimated science and underestimated religion, then contradicted himself by inventing one.
4. The hierarchy of the sciences is arbitrary and does not fit their actual development.

For full marks, cover: the ways social media touches litigation, the positive effects, the harms with trial by media at their centre, the effect on each participant in a trial, the use of social media as evidence, the legal framework with the leading cases, comparative approaches, and a reasoned conclusion.

The several ways social media touches court cases

Social media affects litigation in at least five distinct ways, and separating them is the first step in a good answer:

1. As a source of publicity about a pending case, which may prejudice it.
2. As a source of evidence, since posts, messages and metadata are increasingly tendered in court.
3. As a subject matter of litigation, in defamation, hate speech, obscenity and privacy cases.
4. As a channel of access to justice, through the publication of judgments, the live streaming of proceedings and legal awareness.
5. As a pressure on the judiciary itself, through comment on judges and decisions.

6. Speedy circulation of precedent, which benefits practitioners and law students in places with no library.
7. Locating witnesses and absconders, and service of summons by electronic means, permitted in several jurisdictions and used in India.

Harms

1. Trial by media and prejudgment. The central harm. Guilt is pronounced by publicity before adjudication. It violates the presumption of innocence, a component of the fair trial guarantee under Article 21; it destroys reputation irreversibly, since an acquittal receives a fraction of the coverage the accusation received; and it inflicts a sanction from which there is no appeal.

2. Pressure on witnesses. Witnesses read what is being said, are identified and abused online, and may be intimidated into silence or into conforming their evidence to the public account.

3. Pressure on judges. Adverse comment, campaigns and abuse directed at individual judges, and the creation of an atmosphere in which an acquittal will be read as a failure. Judicial independence requires that a judge decide on the record, and it is harder to do so under organised public pressure.

Social media as evidence

Electronic records are admissible under Section 65B of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, now Section 63 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, subject to a certificate as to the conditions of production. The requirement was held mandatory in Anvar P. V. v. P. K. Basheer (2014), doubted in Shafhi Mohammad, and settled by a three judge bench in Arjun Panditrao Khotkar v. Kailash Kushanrao Gorantyal (2020), which held the certificate mandatory for secondary electronic evidence and laid down how it may be obtained where the device is not in the party's possession.

The practical difficulties are authenticity, since screenshots are trivially fabricated; chain of custody; the growing problem of deepfakes, which will make the authentication of audio and video the central evidentiary question of the next decade; and the privacy limits on obtaining such material, following K. S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), which held privacy a fundamental right under Article 21.

The legal framework

• Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015): struck down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, as unconstitutionally vague and over broad, and read down Section 79(3)(b) so that an intermediary need act only on a court order or a government notification. It remains the governing authority on online speech.
• The Information Technology Act, 2000, and the Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules, 2021.
• Section 74 of the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015, and the prohibition on disclosing the identity of victims of sexual offences.
• Swapnil Tripathi v. Supreme Court of India (2018), permitting live streaming, and the Model Rules framed after it.
• Bar Council of India Rules, which restrict advertising by advocates and therefore constrain their use of social media.

A reasoned conclusion

Social media has done more good than harm to access and transparency and more harm than good to fair trial. The right response is neither prohibition, which would sacrifice open justice and is in any case unenforceable, nor indifference. It is: