BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 5 Legal Language 2019-20 Question Paper with Solutions

My pocket has been picked.

(If the agent is to be kept: My pocket has been picked by someone.)

He is not always wise.

Tell me your address.

(Equally acceptable: Tell me the place of your residence.)

"Alas! We finally met," she said.

(Equally acceptable: "Alas, we finally met," she said.)

3. It carried campaigning and reform writing, on domestic violence, sexual harassment at the workplace and the rights of women in matrimonial proceedings, and its editors were directly involved in the drafting and passage of legislation in those fields.
4. It documented the work of legal aid, reporting cases fought for those who could not pay, and case comments explaining what a judgment would mean for the people affected by it.

Read as a whole: the case of Shivlal Yadav against Chatur Singh, decided by the Gujarat High Court and reported at page 583 of the 1995 volume of the All India Reporter.

De minimis non curat lex means "the law does not concern itself with trifles." The law will not take notice of very small or trivial matters, and a court will refuse a remedy where the injury complained of is so slight that no reasonable person would think it worth complaining about.

Why the rule exists. Courts are a scarce public resource and litigation is expensive. If every trivial interference were actionable, the courts would be occupied with the loss of a single leaf from a neighbour's tree while genuine claims waited behind it. The maxim is a rule of judicial economy and of common sense, not a permission to inflict small wrongs.

Where it operates:

• Criminal law. The Indian Penal Code, 1860, provided in its General Exceptions that nothing is an offence by reason that it causes, or is intended to cause, harm so slight that no person of ordinary sense and temper would complain of it; the corresponding provision is carried into the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023. This is the maxim in statutory form.

The maxim, printed on the paper as "Salus Populiest Suprema Lex" and taken from Cicero's De Legibus, is properly salus populi est suprema lex and means "the welfare (or safety) of the people is the supreme law." It expresses the principle that the interest of the community prevails over the interest of the individual, and that where the two conflict the law prefers the public good.

It is habitually paired with necessitas publica major est quam privata, "public necessity is greater than private necessity". Together the two are the classical foundation of the state's power to interfere with private right for a public purpose.

Where it operates:

1. Eminent domain, the compulsory acquisition of private property for a public purpose on payment of compensation, now governed in India by the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, which replaced the Land Acquisition Act, 1894.
2. The police power of the state: public health, sanitation, town planning, drug control, licensing, and the regulation of dangerous or offensive trades.

Rex non potest peccare means "the King can do no wrong." It is the foundation of sovereign immunity: that the Crown, and therefore the State, could not be sued in its own courts for a wrong, and was not liable for the torts of its servants.

Two propositions are packed into it. First, the King is personally immune from suit and prosecution. Second, and more sweepingly, the King is incapable in law of authorising a wrong, so that a servant sued for a tort cannot plead the King's command as a defence, and the Crown itself is not vicariously liable.

In England the doctrine was largely abolished by the Crown Proceedings Act, 1947, which made the Crown liable in tort broadly as a private person of full age and capacity.

In India:

• Article 300(1) of the Constitution provides that the Union and the States may sue and be sued, and continues the position that obtained before the Constitution, that is, the liability of the East India Company and later of the Secretary of State for India.

• N. Nagendra Rao & Co. v. State of Andhra Pradesh (1994) confined Kasturi Lal narrowly, holding that in a modern welfare state very few functions are so exclusively sovereign as to attract immunity.
• In the constitutional jurisdiction the immunity is simply gone. Nilabati Behera v. State of Orissa (1993) held that compensation for the violation of a fundamental right is a public law remedy under Articles 32 and 226 to which sovereign immunity is no defence, and D. K. Basu confirmed it.

(ii) Discharge. A discharge is an order made before the charge is framed, releasing the accused because the material placed before the court does not disclose sufficient ground for proceeding against him. It is made at the threshold, on the police report and the documents accompanying it, after hearing the prosecution and the accused. Under the Code the provisions were Section 227 in a sessions trial, Section 239 in a warrant case on a police report, Section 245 in a warrant case on a complaint, and Section 258 for stopping proceedings in a summons case.

Consequences: the accused is released without a trial; there is no finding on the merits; and in an appropriate case, on fresh material, proceedings may be revived, because a discharge does not attract the bar of double jeopardy in the way an acquittal does.

The distinction, which is the point of the question:

A legal right is an interest recognised and protected by law, whose violation is a legal wrong. Jurists classify rights in several ways; two of the most important are these.

(1) Right in rem and right in personam.

• A right in rem is available against the whole world and corresponds to a duty on persons generally. The owner of a house has a right in rem: everyone is under a duty not to trespass on it, not to damage it and not to disturb his possession. Ownership, personal liberty, reputation and bodily security are rights in rem.
• A right in personam is available against a determinate person and corresponds to a duty on that person alone. A creditor's right to be paid by his debtor, a buyer's right to delivery from his seller, and a tenant's rights under his lease are rights in personam.

Why the distinction matters: the remedy differs. A positive right is enforced by compelling performance, by a decree for money, specific performance or mandamus. A negative right is enforced by restraining the wrongdoer, by injunction, or by damages for having disturbed a state of affairs that ought not to have been disturbed. The distinction also runs through constitutional law, where the classical fundamental rights are largely negative, claims against interference by the State, while the socio-economic rights read into Article 21 are positive, claims that the State should act.

Step 3. Find the leading case through a digest or subject index, under "Contract, minor's agreement". It is Mohori Bibee v. Dharmodas Ghose (1903) 30 IA 114, ILR 30 Cal 539, a decision of the Privy Council on appeal from Calcutta.

Step 4. Read the case, not the headnote. Dharmodas Ghose, a minor, mortgaged his house to a moneylender whose attorney knew of the minority, and sued to have the mortgage set aside. The Privy Council held that a minor's agreement is absolutely void, void ab initio, and not merely voidable; refused to order repayment under Sections 64 and 65 of the Contract Act, because those sections presuppose a contract between competent parties; and held that estoppel did not operate against the minor where the lender knew the true position.

Step 5. Bring the search forward in time, using a digest, a citator, or an online database, SCC Online, Manupatra or the free Indian Kanoon, to check that the case has not been overruled and to collect the qualifications later decisions have added:

• a minor may enforce a contract made for his benefit; the disability is a shield, not a sword;

The subject. "Law and Literature" is the study of the relationship between the two disciplines. It grew into an organised field of scholarship in the United States in the 1970s, and it is conventionally divided into two branches:

1. Law in literature: the study of how law, lawyers, trials and justice are represented in works of imaginative literature.
2. Law as literature: the study of legal texts, statutes, judgments, pleadings, using the tools of literary criticism, that is, treating them as writing that must be interpreted, and examining their narrative, rhetoric and style.

Law in literature: the standing examples.

• Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice: the trial of Antonio on the bond, which raises the letter of the law against its spirit, the propriety of a judge with an interest in the case, and the use of a technicality to defeat a claim the court dislikes.

Law as literature. On this side the claim is that a judgment is a piece of writing, and that reading it well requires the same skills as reading a poem: attention to the words chosen, to what is emphasised and what is passed over, to the order in which the facts are narrated, and to the persona the writer adopts. James Boyd White's The Legal Imagination (1973) is the founding work. The insight is not decorative: the facts of a case as stated in a judgment are already an interpretation, because someone chose which facts to state.

Why it belongs on a law syllabus.

1. It teaches interpretation. Statutory interpretation is the reading of a difficult text whose author is absent and whose words must be applied to situations the author did not foresee. That is what literary criticism trains a reader to do.
2. It teaches the ambiguity of language, which is the practical problem of every drafting exercise and every dispute about a contract.
3. It teaches narrative. A case is won on the facts far more often than on the law, and presenting facts is storytelling under constraint.

The Indian connection. The BLS LLB syllabus itself is an example of the field in practice: it sets The Merchant of Venice, The Pickwick Papers, Adam Bede, the Apology and the trial speeches of Gandhi alongside the technical subjects, precisely so that students meet law as a human institution before they meet it as a set of sections. Indian judicial prose supplies the other half: the judgments of Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer, dense with allusion and metaphor, are studied as writing as much as for what they decide, and the debate about whether that style serves or obscures the law is itself a "law as literature" question.

Conclusion. Law and literature are both made of language, and both are about the ordering of human conduct. Literature shows the law what it looks like from the outside, to the person it is being done to; and the discipline of reading literature is the same discipline a lawyer applies to a statute, a contract or a judgment. The connection is not decorative. It is a claim about how lawyers should be trained.

• M. P. Sharma v. Satish Chandra (1954), an eight-judge Bench, and Kharak Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh (1962), a six-judge Bench, had held or been read as holding that privacy is not a guaranteed right under the Constitution. It was these two decisions, and their strength in numbers, that made a nine-judge reference necessary in 2017.
• Gobind v. State of Madhya Pradesh (1975) accepted a limited right of privacy emanating from Articles 19 and 21, subject to a compelling state interest.
• R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu (1994), the Auto Shankar case, recognised a right to be let alone and held that a citizen has a right to safeguard the privacy of his own, his family's, marriage, procreation, motherhood and education, subject to the exception of matters of public record and the conduct of public officials in the discharge of their duties.
• PUCL v. Union of India (1997), the telephone tapping case, held that a telephone conversation is protected by Article 21 and laid down safeguards for interception.
• Puttaswamy (2017) overruled M. P. Sharma and Kharak Singh to the extent that they held there is no right to privacy, and settled the question.

• Puttaswamy (II), the Aadhaar judgment (2018), upheld the Aadhaar scheme in the main while striking down Section 57, which had permitted private bodies to demand authentication, and applying the proportionality test to each use.
• The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, is the legislative response on informational privacy, creating obligations for data fiduciaries, rights for data principals and a Data Protection Board.

The tensions the essay should name. Privacy against national security and law enforcement, which is the surveillance and interception question. Privacy against the right to information and the freedom of the press, which is where R. Rajagopal draws the line at public records and the conduct of public officials. Privacy against the efficient delivery of welfare, which was the whole argument in Aadhaar. And privacy against the commercial exploitation of personal data, which is now the largest practical threat and the one the Constitution was not designed for.

Citation. D. K. Basu v. State of West Bengal, AIR 1997 SC 610, (1997) 1 SCC 416, decided by Justice Kuldip Singh and Justice A. S. Anand.

Facts. D. K. Basu, Executive Chairman of Legal Aid Services, West Bengal, a non-political organisation, wrote a letter to the Chief Justice of India in 1986 drawing attention to newspaper reports of deaths in police lock-ups and in custody, and asking that it be treated as a writ petition under the Court's epistolary jurisdiction. It was so treated. A second letter, from Ashok K. Johri concerning a custodial death at Aligarh, was heard with it. The Court issued notice to all the State Governments and to the Law Commission, and over the following decade received affidavits showing that custodial deaths were continuing.

Issues.

1. Whether custodial death, torture and lock-up violence infringe Articles 21 and 22(1) of the Constitution.

2. The arresting officer shall prepare a memo of arrest at the time of arrest, attested by at least one witness, a family member of the arrestee or a respectable person of the locality, countersigned by the arrestee, bearing the date and time of arrest.
3. The person arrested is entitled to have one friend, relative or other person known to him informed as soon as practicable of the arrest and the place of detention.
4. Where that person lives outside the district, the time and place of arrest and the venue of custody must be notified through the Legal Aid Organisation of the district and the police station of the area, telegraphically, within 8 to 12 hours.
5. The arrested person must be made aware of this right as soon as he is arrested or detained.
6. An entry must be made in the diary at the place of detention, recording the arrest, the person informed, and the particulars of the police officials having custody.
7. The arrestee shall, on request, be examined at the time of arrest and any injuries recorded; the "Inspection Memo" must be signed by the arrestee and the arresting officer, and a copy given to the arrestee.

Compensation. The Court held that monetary compensation is an appropriate and effective public law remedy for an established infringement of Article 21; that it is distinct from a private law claim in tort; that it rests on strict liability, to which sovereign immunity is no defence; and that the State may recover the amount from the officer responsible. This followed Nilabati Behera v. State of Orissa (1993).

Aftermath. The guidelines were substantially enacted into the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 by the amendment of 2008, which inserted Sections 41B, 41D, 50A and 55A. The Code has since been replaced by the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, which carries these safeguards forward. In 2015 the Court directed the installation of CCTV cameras in police stations, a direction taken further in Paramvir Singh Saini v. Baljit Singh (2020).

A writ petition under Article 32 was then filed by Vishaka, a women's rights group, together with other social activists and non-governmental organisations, as a class action, not to reopen the criminal case but to obtain a general remedy: a declaration that sexual harassment at the workplace violates fundamental rights, and directions to protect working women. The petitioners' point was that Bhanwari Devi was assaulted because of her work, and that the State, as her employer, had failed to protect her.

Issues.

1. Whether sexual harassment at the workplace violates Articles 14, 15, 19(1)(g) and 21 of the Constitution, that is, equality, non-discrimination on the ground of sex, the right to practise any profession or carry on any occupation, and the right to life with dignity.
2. Whether, in the absence of any enacted law on the subject, the Supreme Court may lay down binding guidelines to fill the vacuum.
3. Whether international conventions, in particular the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which India ratified in 1993, may be read into the fundamental rights where domestic law is silent.

1. Duty of the employer. It is the duty of every employer, in the public and private sectors, to prevent or deter sexual harassment and to provide procedures for the resolution and prosecution of complaints.
2. Definition. Sexual harassment means unwelcome sexually determined behaviour, whether direct or by implication, comprising physical contact and advances; a demand or request for sexual favours; sexually coloured remarks; showing pornography; and any other unwelcome physical, verbal or non-verbal conduct of a sexual nature.
3. Preventive steps. Express prohibition of sexual harassment must be notified, published and circulated; the conduct rules of government servants must include prohibition and penalties; standing orders in private employment must be amended accordingly; and working conditions must not be hostile to women.
4. Criminal proceedings. Where the conduct amounts to an offence under the penal law, the employer must initiate action by complaining to the appropriate authority, and must ensure that victims and witnesses are not victimised or discriminated against, with the option of the transfer of the victim or the offender.
5. Disciplinary action must be taken where the conduct amounts to misconduct under the service rules.

Aftermath. The guidelines were applied and strengthened in Apparel Export Promotion Council v. A. K. Chopra (1999) and in Medha Kotwal Lele v. Union of India (2013). Sixteen years after the judgment, Parliament enacted the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, which came into force on 9 December 2013, and which now governs the field: it requires an Internal Complaints Committee in every workplace with ten or more employees, a Local Committee in every district for the unorganised sector and smaller establishments, and prescribes an inquiry procedure, time limits and penalties. The Vishaka Guidelines therefore no longer operate as the source of the obligation, but the case remains the constitutional foundation on which the Act rests.

3. catchwords and a headnote summarising the facts and the propositions decided, written by the editor;
4. the cases cited;
5. the counsel who appeared;
6. a statement of the facts and the procedural history;
7. the judgments verbatim, including any dissent;
8. the order and the direction as to costs.

Two law reports, described.

(1) All India Reporter (AIR). Founded at Nagpur in 1914 by V. V. Chitaley, AIR is the oldest continuously published general law report in India and the most widely cited. It reports the Supreme Court, the High Courts and, historically, the Federal Court and the Privy Council, in separate court-wise volumes, along with Central and State legislation. Its citation style puts the year first, without brackets: AIR 1995 Guj 583. Its companion publications include the Criminal Law Journal and the AIR Manual, a subject-arranged consolidation of Indian statutes with case annotations, which is the standard first stop in a legal search. AIR is a private publication.

However, the decision making as to how we power the economy in a carbon constrained world is only just beginning. Fossil fuels like coal and oil have underpinned our economic growth and standard of living for decades.

The current resources boom is there because other countries want our fossil fuels, and for all these reasons it is profitable to keep mining them. Ironically, the income may help develop the technologies to replace them, but it is a matter of which and when.

In the race to reduce emissions, new technologies, namely solar power, wind power and geothermal power (described in the passage as heat from rocks), will compete against gas, clean coal and perhaps nuclear energy, to win, in the passage's phrase, the hearts and minds of the business world.

3. What will business favour in the end?

In the end business will favour whatever is a cheap, abundant and reliable solution. The passage puts no weight on which technology is cleanest or newest; the three criteria it names are cost, abundance and reliability.

4. What is the purpose of lobbying?

The lobbying by the different interest groups is directed at attracting business capital and government support, so that the lobbyist's own technology wins out over the others.

5. Provide your views on the above passage.

(Equally acceptable: "The Race to Replace Fossil Fuels" or "After Carbon Trading: Which Technology Wins?")