BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 5 Legal Language 2023-24 Question Paper with Solutions

This experience will never be forgotten by me.

The jury ordered that the first convict should be called.

(Equally acceptable: The jury ordered them to call the first convict.)

Law Teller is an Indian monthly law magazine published from Delhi, written for the general reader and for students rather than for practitioners. Any two of the following are features of it:

1. It reports and digests recent judgments of the Supreme Court and the High Courts in plain, non-technical English, so that a reader without legal training can follow what was decided and why.
2. Its purpose is legal awareness rather than legal citation. It carries articles on the everyday law a citizen meets: consumer protection, tenancy, matrimonial disputes, service matters, cheque dishonour, motor accident claims and the rights of an arrested person.
3. It carries a readers' query column, in which questions sent in by readers about their own legal problems are answered by advocates.
4. It is a priced monthly for a general readership and carries legal news, notifications and amendments as well as case summaries.

(a) Respondeat superior means "let the superior answer", or let the principal be liable. It is the maxim on which vicarious liability rests: a master is answerable for a tort committed by his servant in the course of employment, and is liable jointly with the servant although the master himself is without fault. It is often paired with qui facit per alium facit per se, "he who acts through another acts himself".

(b) Caveat emptor means "let the buyer beware". It is the rule of the law of sale that the buyer must satisfy himself as to the quality and fitness of what he buys, and that in the absence of fraud or an express warranty the seller is not answerable for defects.

We are late for the movies, aren't we?

The grounds are confined to jurisdiction. The High Court may interfere where the subordinate court has:

1. exercised a jurisdiction not vested in it by law;
2. failed to exercise a jurisdiction so vested; or
3. acted in the exercise of its jurisdiction illegally or with material irregularity.

The differences:

Audi alteram partem means "hear the other side", and it is one of the two classical rules of natural justice. It requires that no person shall be condemned unheard: before an order is made affecting a person's rights, interests or legitimate expectations, he must be given notice of the case against him and a fair opportunity to answer it.

Its content, which is where the marks are:

1. Notice. The person must be told what is alleged against him, in terms specific enough to allow an answer, and in time to prepare one. A vague or belated notice is no notice.
2. An opportunity to be heard, which may be in writing or oral, according to what the matter requires.
3. Disclosure of the material relied on. A decision may not rest on evidence, reports or representations the affected person has not seen.
4. The right to cross-examine, where the case against him rests on the evidence of witnesses.
5. Legal representation, where the issues are complex or the other side is represented.

Exceptions. The rule is excluded or curtailed where there is a genuine emergency requiring immediate action, such as the seizure of contaminated food; where the statute expressly excludes it, subject to Article 14; where confidentiality or the security of the State is involved; where compliance is impracticable, as with very large numbers of persons; in matters of academic evaluation; and where a hearing would be a useless formality because the outcome could not have been different, an exception Indian courts apply narrowly.

3. Subject-matter bias, a direct interest in the issue or its outcome.
4. Departmental or policy bias, and the related problem of the officer who investigates and then adjudicates. A. K. Kraipak v. Union of India (1969) is the leading Indian authority: a member of the selection board was himself a candidate for selection, and the selections were quashed. The case also abolished the old distinction between judicial and administrative functions for the purposes of natural justice.

The test. The question is not whether the decision-maker was in fact biased, which is usually impossible to prove and would require the court to examine a judge's mind. It is whether there was a real likelihood of bias, or, on the wider formulation, a reasonable apprehension of bias in the mind of a reasonable person. The governing statement is from R v. Sussex Justices, ex parte McCarthy (1924): "justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done."

Effect. An order made in breach of the rule is liable to be quashed by certiorari, or set aside in appeal or writ proceedings, without the aggrieved person having to show that a different decision would have been reached.

BE it enacted by parliament in the twelfth year of The Republic of India as follows:

BE it enacted by the parliament in the twenty-second year of Republic of India as follows:

Begin by noticing what makes this search different. The law of torts in India is not codified. There is no Indian Torts Act, and negligence is judge-made law received from the English common law and developed by the Indian courts. A search that begins with a statute, as it would for contract or for criminal law, will find nothing, and recognising that is the first step.

Step 1. Frame the issue in the language of the tort. Negligence has three ingredients, and the search terms follow them: a duty of care owed by the defendant to the plaintiff; a breach of that duty by falling below the standard of the reasonable man; and damage caused by the breach which is not too remote. Add the defences: contributory negligence, volenti non fit injuria, act of God, and inevitable accident.

Step 2. Start with the standard commentaries, because they are the finding tools for uncodified law. Ratanlal and Dhirajlal's Law of Torts, Winfield and Jolowicz and Salmond and Heuston will give you the leading authorities and the current state of each rule. Remember that a textbook is not authority: it tells you where to look, and you cite the case.

Step 4. Do not overlook the statutes that intersect with the tort, even though negligence itself is uncodified: the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, which governs most negligence litigation in practice and which provides for compensation without proof of fault in defined cases; the Fatal Accidents Act, 1855; the Employees' Compensation Act, 1923; and the Consumer Protection Act, 2019.

Step 5. Use the finding tools properly. The AIR Manual and the digests are arranged by subject; look under "Negligence" and then under the sub-heading that matches your facts, "medical", "motor accident", "occupier's liability", "public authority". Then use a citator or an online database, SCC Online, Manupatra or the free Indian Kanoon, to bring the search forward and to check that the case has been followed and not overruled.

Step 6. Read the judgment, not the headnote, and identify the ratio decidendi, the proposition necessary to the decision on the material facts. A headnote is written by the report's editor, is not part of the judgment and binds nobody.

The technique. Article 48A and Article 51A(g) are, respectively, unenforceable and non-justiciable. Article 21 is enforceable. The Court read the unenforceable principle into the enforceable right, holding that the right to life means more than animal existence and includes the right to live in a healthy environment. That single move is the foundation of the whole subject.

The decisions that mark the development.

• Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra v. State of Uttar Pradesh (1985), the Dehradun limestone quarrying case, the first major environmental PIL, in which the Court ordered quarries closed although this cost employment.
• M. C. Mehta v. Union of India (1987), the Oleum Gas Leak case, which created the rule of absolute liability: an enterprise carrying on a hazardous activity is liable for harm resulting from it without any of the exceptions that qualify the rule in Rylands v. Fletcher, and compensation must be correlated to the magnitude and capacity of the enterprise so that it deters.
• Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar (1991), which stated in terms that the right to life includes the right to enjoyment of pollution-free water and air.

1. Public interest litigation and relaxed locus standi, so that anyone acting in good faith may move the court on behalf of those who cannot.
2. Epistolary jurisdiction, treating a letter as a petition.
3. Absolute liability, replacing a rule with five exceptions by a rule with none.
4. The polluter pays and precautionary principles, which shift the burden and the cost.
5. The public trust doctrine, which limits what the State itself may alienate.
6. Continuing mandamus, retaining a case for years and issuing directions as the matter develops.
7. Expert committees and amici curiae, to supply the scientific material a court does not have.
8. Compensation and restitution, ordering polluters to pay for remediation.

3. Distributional cost. Closing a tannery cleans a river and puts its workers out of work, and the workers are rarely represented before the court that orders the closure. The doctrine of sustainable development is the courts' answer, but it is a principle rather than a method.
4. Inconsistency. The same court that developed the precautionary principle has also cleared large projects, and the outcome can be hard to predict from the doctrine alone.

Conclusion. The judicial approach has been creative, purposive and, by international standards, remarkable: India has a constitutional right to a clean environment that no legislature ever enacted. Its weakness is the mirror image of its strength. Because the law came from the courts rather than from the political process, it has never had to be paid for, and the machinery of enforcement, which only the executive and the legislature can build, has never been built to match it.

3. Scientific. The great majority of scientific papers are published in English, and a scientist who cannot read it is cut off from the field.
4. Cultural and technological reach: cinema, popular music, and then the internet, which began as an American network and whose early content was overwhelmingly in English.

To these should be added its role as the language of international institutions, of civil aviation, where ICAO requires English for radio communication, and of maritime communication.

English in India. The Indian position is the most interesting part of the essay for a law student, and it is where the marks are.

• The Constitution made Hindi in Devanagari the official language of the Union under Article 343, with English to continue for fifteen years; the Official Languages Act, 1963, provided for English to continue indefinitely as an associate official language, which is where matters still stand.
• Article 351 directs the Union to promote the spread of Hindi; the Eighth Schedule now lists twenty-two languages.

3. Mobility. It is the single largest determinant of employability in the Indian service economy.
4. The law. Indian legal literature, the reports, the statutes in their authoritative text, and the entire body of received common law, is in English.

The case against.

1. Linguistic imperialism. Robert Phillipson's Linguistic Imperialism (1992) argues that the global spread of English is not neutral but reproduces inequality between nations and within them.
2. Language death. UNESCO estimates that a large proportion of the world's languages will not survive the century, and the dominance of a few global languages is part of the cause.

Citation. Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan, AIR 1997 SC 3011, (1997) 6 SCC 241, decided by Chief Justice J. S. Verma, Justice Sujata V. Manohar and Justice B. N. Kirpal. The paper prints the name as "Vaisakha".

The background. Bhanwari Devi was a saathin, a village-level social worker in the Government of Rajasthan's Women's Development Programme. In the course of her work she tried to prevent the child marriage of an infant girl in a village family, and in 1992, in revenge, she was gang-raped by men of that family. The trial court acquitted the accused in 1995. A writ petition under Article 32 was then filed by Vishaka, a women's rights group, with other organisations, as a class action, not to reopen the criminal case but to obtain protection for working women generally, on the footing that she had been attacked because of her work and that the State, as her employer, had failed to protect her.

The holdings that support the guidelines.

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. The prohibition must be notified, published and circulated in appropriate ways; the conduct rules of government servants must include the prohibition and provide penalties; standing orders under the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act, 1946, must be amended accordingly in private employment; and working conditions must not be hostile to women.
4. Criminal proceedings. Where the conduct amounts to a specific 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 of the offender.
5. Disciplinary action must be taken where the conduct amounts to misconduct under the service rules.
6. Complaint mechanism. An appropriate complaint mechanism must exist in the employer's organisation, providing for the time-bound treatment of complaints.

What followed. The guidelines were applied and strengthened in Apparel Export Promotion Council v. A. K. Chopra (1999) and 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, in force from 9 December 2013, which now governs the field: it requires an Internal Complaints Committee in every workplace with ten or more employees and a Local Committee in each district for the unorganised sector and smaller establishments, and it prescribes the inquiry procedure, time limits, interim reliefs and penalties.

The reasoning. The Court described custodial torture as "a naked violation of human dignity", and held that the right guaranteed by Article 21 is not lost by a convict, an undertrial, a detenu or any other prisoner in custody, and that Article 22(1) guarantees the right to be informed of the grounds of arrest and to consult a legal practitioner. It stressed why declarations alone had failed: the victim is in the exclusive custody of the police, there are no independent witnesses, and injuries are seldom recorded, so the protection has to operate at the moment of arrest rather than depend on proof afterwards.

The eleven guidelines, to be followed in all cases of arrest and detention as preventive measures:

1. Police personnel carrying out the arrest and handling the interrogation must bear accurate, visible and clear identification and name tags with their designations, and the particulars of all such personnel must be recorded in a register.
2. The arresting officer shall prepare a memo of arrest at the time of arrest, attested by at least one witness, being a family member of the arrestee or a respectable person of the locality, and countersigned by the arrestee, bearing the date and time of arrest.

9. Copies of all documents, including the memo of arrest, must be sent to the Illaqa Magistrate for his record.
10. The arrestee may be permitted to meet his lawyer during interrogation, though not throughout the interrogation.
11. A police control room must be provided at every district and State headquarters, to which the arresting officer must communicate the fact and place of arrest within 12 hours, and where it must be displayed on a conspicuous notice board.

The Court directed that these be followed in all cases, that breach would render the official liable for departmental action and for contempt of court, and that the requirements are in addition to and not in derogation of other constitutional and statutory safeguards.

Compensation. The Court held that monetary compensation is an appropriate and effective remedy in public law for an established infringement of Article 21; that this 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).

Definition. A law report is a published record of a judicial decision considered of sufficient importance to be reported, setting out the material facts, the arguments, the judgment of the court and the order made, edited and published so that the decision may be found, read and cited as a precedent in later cases.

A law report is not the record of a case, which is the file of pleadings and evidence, and not a transcript, which is a verbatim note of proceedings. It is selective and edited: only a small fraction of decisions is reported, and the reporter adds apparatus which the judgment does not contain.

The importance of law reports:

1. They make the doctrine of precedent workable. Stare decisis requires like cases to be decided alike, and Article 141 of the Constitution makes the law declared by the Supreme Court binding on all courts in India. A binding decision is useless unless it can be found. Law reporting is the machinery that turns the doctrine from a principle into a practice.

• Founded at Nagpur in 1914 by V. V. Chitaley; the oldest continuously published general law report in India and the most widely cited.
• Coverage: the Supreme Court, all the High Courts, and historically the Federal Court and the Privy Council, in separate court-wise volumes; it also prints Central and State legislation.
• Citation form: the year first, without brackets, then the report, then the court, then the page: AIR 1997 SC 610.
• Companion publications: the Criminal Law Journal (Cri LJ), and the AIR Manual, a subject-arranged consolidation of Indian statutes with case annotations, which is the standard first stop in a legal search.
• Status: a private publication.

(2) Supreme Court Cases (SCC).

• Published by the Eastern Book Company, Lucknow, since 1969.
• Coverage: the decisions of the Supreme Court of India exclusively, and it is generally regarded as the most complete and accurate text of the Court's judgments; it is the report most often cited in the courts today.

I remember being on the streets all day, playing or lazing around. When I turned ten, my mother and my sister came to live in Mumbai too.

My sister was a bright student, always securing high grades. She and my mother encouraged me to study, but I just could not bring myself to concentrate on any subject.

So how come she doesn't teach you so that you too can do well? she asked.

I peered at her, wondering if she was making fun of me, but all I could see on her face was earnestness. No, she is not trying to tease me.

I decided. This time I answered a little more warmly, 'She tries to, but I don't like studying.' 'Why not?

I'm sure you can get good grades too,' she said emphatically. 'No, I can't.

I have no brains. God forgot to give me brains, health or beauty.

He gave me nothing.' "That's not true. And anyway, health and beauty can't be helped, but God has given brains to everyone, we only have to learn to use it.' I shook my head, 'No, I have difficulty in concentrating, and books bore me; there is no hope for me.

Please leave me alone. I am stupid, and always will be.' With the gentlest tone that she could muster she said, 'I can prove it to you that you are not stupid.

She believed it because nothing in her experience had ever contradicted it and everything appeared to confirm it. She says that ever since she can remember she always felt she was stupid; she could not bring myself to concentrate on any subject, got bored and felt sleepy when forced to open her books, and failed the sixth grade and had to repeat the year. The comparison at home made it worse: her sister Devika was a bright student, always securing high grades, so the writer had a daily measure of her own failure. Encouragement, "innumerable lectures on the importance of studying", and finally her mother's threats had all failed, and the conclusion she drew was that the fault lay in her: "no matter how much I worked, it wouldn't help."

(b) Give a reason for the following: the writer flinched as she saw her friend walking towards her.

She flinched because Aditi's presence was a reminder of her own failure. The two had been in the same class the year before; the writer had failed sixth grade and had to repeat the year, while Aditi had topped the class and was the brightest student of the seventh grade too. Meeting the girl who had gone on ahead of her forced the comparison on her, and she expected either pity or mockery. That is why she answered "not with much enthusiasm", why she wanted her to leave, and why she went on eating her chips instead of speaking.

Her lack of assertiveness shows in the scene under the tree. She wanted Aditi to leave and did not say so, expressing it only by coldness and by going on eating; she sat in silence for five minutes; and when Aditi persisted, "she won and I relented." The last sentence of the passage is the proof of both: "Her belief in me proved more powerful than my doubts about myself."

(e) Why did the writer live with her grandmother?

Because she was a sick child, a polio victim, and she lived with her grandmother in Mumbai so that she could avail of the metro's advanced medical facilities. Her father had died when she was three.

(f) Who came to live with the writer when she was ten years old?

Her mother and her sister, who came to live in Mumbai when she turned ten. Her sister is named later in the passage as Devika.