BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 5 Legal Language 2025-26 Question Paper with Solutions

A letter is written by Ann.

Ex parte is Latin for "from one side" or "on behalf of one party only". It describes a proceeding taken in the absence of, and without hearing, the other party.

Its two commonest uses are:

• An ex parte decree or order, passed against a defendant who, having been duly served, fails to appear, so that the suit is heard in his absence. Under Order IX Rule 6 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, the court may proceed ex parte, and under Order IX Rule 13 the defendant may apply to have the decree set aside on showing that the summons was not duly served or that he was prevented by sufficient cause from appearing.
• An ex parte injunction, granted on the application of one party alone, before notice to the other, where the object of granting it would be defeated by delay. Order XXXIX Rule 3 requires the court to record its reasons for proceeding without notice and to require the applicant to deliver the papers to the other side at once.

Welfare legislation, also called beneficial or remedial legislation, is a statute enacted for the benefit and protection of a particular class of persons who are at a disadvantage, so as to remedy a wrong, redress an inequality of bargaining power, or confer a benefit or a new remedy which the class did not previously have.

Rule of construction: welfare legislation is construed liberally, so as to advance the benefit and suppress the mischief, and where two constructions are reasonably possible the one that favours the class the statute was passed to protect is preferred.

Examples: the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961; the Employees' Compensation Act, 1923; the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947; the Minimum Wages Act, 1948; the Consumer Protection Act, 2019; the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005; and the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016.

A "wrong" is the wider term: any violation of a legal right or breach of a legal duty. It includes civil wrongs, such as a tort or a breach of contract, for which the remedy is compensation or specific relief at the suit of the injured person, and criminal wrongs, which are offences.

An "offence" is any act or omission made punishable by law for the time being in force, which is the definition in Section 3(38) of the General Clauses Act, 1897. An offence is a public wrong: it is prosecuted by the State, and the consequence is punishment.

Every offence is a wrong; not every wrong is an offence.

Others available: statutes in pari materia, that is, statutes on the same subject, read together as one system; the General Clauses Act, 1897, whose definitions and rules are read into every Central Act; parliamentary debates and committee and Law Commission reports; historical facts and surrounding circumstances; contemporanea expositio, the meaning given by those who administered the Act from the beginning; textbooks and commentaries; foreign decisions; and international conventions.

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. It is selective and edited: only a small fraction of decisions is reported, and the reporter adds apparatus which the judgment does not contain.

Why they exist. The doctrine of precedent requires that like cases 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, so law reporting is the machinery that makes precedent workable.

Specialist reports include the Criminal Law Journal (Cri LJ), Income Tax Reports (ITR), Divorce and Matrimonial Cases (DMC), the Labour Law Journal (LLJ) and Calcutta Weekly Notes (CWN).

The two citation conventions, which decode any Indian citation: AIR puts the year first without brackets and needs no volume number, because it paginates each court's volume continuously through the year; SCC and SCR put the year in brackets and then the volume, because they publish several numbered volumes a year. If the year is in brackets, the number after it is a volume; if the year is bare, the number after the court is a page.

2. The wide application, where the words have only one meaning but that meaning produces a result so absurd or repugnant that the legislature cannot have intended it: the court modifies the words to prevent it.

Illustrations.

• Lee v. Knapp: a statute required a driver involved in an accident to "stop". Read literally, a driver who halted for a moment and drove away had stopped. The court held that the word must be read as requiring him to stop for such time as would enable persons with a right to do so to obtain the information the statute contemplated. Literal compliance would have defeated the section entirely.
• Tirath Singh v. Bachittar Singh: a provision requiring notice to be given to "all persons named in the petition as having been guilty of a corrupt practice" was read as not requiring notice to the petitioner's own opponent, who was already before the court, because the literal reading would have produced a plainly unintended result.

The maxim, from Cicero's De Legibus, 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 they 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 under the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013.
2. The police power of the state: public health, sanitation, town planning, drug control, licensing and the regulation of dangerous or offensive trades.

Noscitur a sociis means "a word is known by the company it keeps." It is a rule of language: where a word of doubtful meaning appears in a statute alongside other words, it takes its colour and meaning from the words associated with it, and is construed as belonging to the same general idea.

The rule rests on a simple assumption about drafting: a legislature does not place unrelated things in one list. If a doubtful word is found in a list of things which have something in common, the natural inference is that the doubtful word shares it.

Illustrations from decided cases:

• State of Bombay v. Hospital Mazdoor Sabha (1960): the definition of "industry" in the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, referred to "trade, business, undertaking, manufacture or calling of employers". The Supreme Court applied noscitur a sociis to the word "undertaking", holding that it must be read as taking colour from the words with which it was associated, and so as meaning an undertaking analogous to a trade or business.

3. It yields to a contrary intention appearing from the statute.
4. It is a rule of construction and not of law, and, in the Supreme Court's phrase, it is "merely a rule of construction and it cannot prevail where it is clear that the wider words have been deliberately used."

10 of 1994) [8th January, 1994] An Act to provide for the constitution of National Human Rights Commission, State Human Rights Commission in States and Human Rights Court for better protection of human rights and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto. Be it enacted by Parliament in the Forty-fourth Year of the Republic of India as follows: - CHAPTER -I : Preliminary

While road capacity has increased by less than 2.5% over the past two decades, the number of vehicles has been rising at an annual rate of over 10%, reaching nearly 12 million vehicles on 3.5 million kilometres of roads. Vehicular emissions account for up to 70% of carbon monoxide, 50% of hydrocarbons, and 30% of particulate matter in urban air, leading to serious health problems such as asthma and lung cancer.

(Equally acceptable: "Too Many Vehicles, Too Little Road" or "Curbing Vehicular Pollution in Indian Cities".)

The main reasons, as the passage gives them:

1. Rapid growth in vehicle numbers combined with inadequate expansion of road infrastructure. Road capacity has increased by less than 2.5 per cent over the past two decades, while the number of vehicles has been rising at over 10 per cent a year, reaching nearly 12 million vehicles on 3.5 million kilometres of roads.
2. The scale of vehicular emissions. They account for up to 70 per cent of carbon monoxide, 50 per cent of hydrocarbons and 30 per cent of particulate matter in urban air, leading to serious health problems such as asthma and lung cancer.
3. Older vehicles. Those over ten years old are responsible for nearly 60 per cent of vehicular pollution, because of poor maintenance, outdated technology and the absence of effective scrappage norms.
4. Adulterated fuel, which further aggravates emission levels.
5. Rising affluence. Small cars and two-wheelers once dominated the market because incomes were low; rising affluence has increased demand for larger, more fuel-intensive vehicles.

3. It is targeted rather than blunt. It falls on the second and subsequent vehicle, so it does not penalise the household buying its first, and it therefore bears most heavily on discretionary ownership.
4. It is progressive, so it is equitable. A flat levy would fall hardest on those least able to pay; a tax rising with each additional vehicle falls on those most able.
5. It generates revenue that can be earmarked, for public transport, for electric buses, for charging infrastructure and for the scrappage of old vehicles, so that the measure funds the alternative it is pushing people towards.
6. It shifts demand to sustainable transport, to buses, the metro, shared mobility and cycling, but only if that alternative exists, which is the condition on which the whole measure depends.
7. It complements the other measures the passage calls for: stricter vehicle and fuel standards, effective scrappage norms, and action against adulterated fuel.

(i) Yes. Yami's action is an "advertisement" within the definition.

Apply the definition to the facts, element by element:

1. "Any audio or VISUAL publicity": a billboard displaying images of a product is visual publicity. It is displayed to the public at large, alongside a highway, and its purpose is to bring the product to their notice.
2. "Representation": the images represent the product and the fact that it is available in supermarkets.

The rule. Where general words follow an enumeration of specific things which constitute a genus or class, the general words are construed as limited to things of the same class.

Why it applies here. The five conditions are satisfied:

1. There is an enumeration of specific words: "notice, circular, label, wrapper, invoice".
2. They constitute a class: each is a written or printed commercial document connected with the goods or the transaction, either accompanying the goods or passing between the trader and the customer.
3. The class is not exhausted by the enumeration; other documents of the same kind plainly exist.
4. The general term follows the enumeration: "or such other documents".
5. There is no indication of a contrary intention in the section.

(i) No. Diya is not a legal heir during her father's lifetime, and her claim of ownership is bad.

Nemo est haeres viventis means "no one is the heir of a living person." Heirship is determined only at the moment of death, so during a person's lifetime nobody can be called his heir. Those who would inherit if he died today are only heirs apparent or heirs presumptive, and what they have is a mere expectation, called a spes successionis, a chance of succession, and not a right.

Three consequences follow on these facts:

Section 43 of the Transfer of Property Act, 1882, the doctrine of "feeding the grant by estoppel", provides that where a person fraudulently or erroneously represents that he is authorised to transfer certain immovable property, and professes to transfer it for consideration, the transfer shall, at the option of the transferee, operate on any interest which the transferor may acquire in that property at any time during which the contract of transfer subsists.

The two provisions appear to conflict, and the conflict is the point of the question. Section 6(a) says a chance of succession cannot be transferred at all; Section 43 says an after-acquired interest may feed a transfer made on an erroneous representation.

The reconciliation is settled by Jumma Masjid, Mercara v. Kodimaniandra Deviah (1962), in which the Supreme Court held that the two sections operate in different fields:

• Section 6(a) applies where BOTH parties know that what is being transferred is a mere chance of succession. They deal with it as an expectancy, and such a transfer is void, and cannot be validated by anything that happens later.

On the facts as stated, the second is the more likely case, and Aman can enforce the sale after the father's death.

Aman's alternative remedies, if Section 43 is unavailable to him: a suit against Diya for the return of the price with interest, and for damages for breach of the covenant of title implied in a sale; and, where the representation was fraudulent, an action for deceit.

A statute has a settled architecture, and each part has a recognised weight when a court comes to construe it. The parts found within the Act are the internal aids to construction.

1. The short title. The name by which the Act is cited: "This Act may be called the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993". Function in interpretation: none. It is a label for convenience and cannot control the meaning of any section.

2. The official citation. The number of the Act in the year of enactment, "Act No. 10 of 1994". A means of unique identification, with no interpretative value; but it is the number, not the name, that is unique, because several Acts a year carry confusable names.

3. The long title. The sentence beginning "An Act to ...", stating the general purpose and scope. Function: it is part of the Act and may legitimately be used to ascertain the general object where a provision is ambiguous. The older English view that the title was no part of the Act has been abandoned; but it cannot control clear enacting words.

8. The definition or interpretation clause. Function: decisive. A definition governs the whole Act "unless the context otherwise requires", and those words matter: a defined meaning yields where the context of a particular section demands otherwise. Note the drafting signals: "means" introduces an exhaustive definition; "includes" an extending one; "means and includes" an exhaustive definition framed widely.

9. Provisos. Clauses beginning "Provided that". Function: a proviso carves an exception out of the provision to which it is attached. Its normal office is to except something that would otherwise fall within the main clause; it must be read with that clause and cannot be construed as enlarging the section.

10. Explanations. Function: to explain or clarify the section, remove a doubt, or fill a gap. An explanation neither enlarges nor curtails the section; it makes plain what the section already contains.

11. Exceptions and saving clauses. An exception exempts what would otherwise be within the section. A saving clause preserves rights, obligations or proceedings which would otherwise be destroyed, most often on a repeal, and is read with Section 6 of the General Clauses Act, 1897.

What artificial intelligence is. AI is the capability of a computer system to perform tasks that ordinarily require human intelligence: learning from data, reasoning, recognising patterns, understanding and generating natural language, and making predictions. What exists today is narrow AI, built for particular tasks; machine learning is the branch in which a system learns rules from data rather than being programmed with them, and generative AI the branch that produces new text.

WHERE IT HAS ALREADY CHANGED LEGAL WORK.

1. Legal research. Searching a corpus of a million judgments by concept rather than by keyword, and retrieving the authorities on a point in seconds, is work that used to take days in a library. SCC Online, Manupatra and the free Indian Kanoon have all added AI-assisted search.

7. Access to justice. Chatbots and guided interfaces that tell a person what his rights are and what form to file. For the very large number of Indians who will never consult a lawyer, this is the application with the greatest potential value of all.
8. Evidence and investigation, where AI assists in forensic analysis and in the review of electronic material.

THE RISKS, WHICH MUST OCCUPY AT LEAST A THIRD OF THE ANSWER.

1. Fabrication. A language model produces the statistically likely output, not the true one, and will generate fluent citations to cases that do not exist. Lawyers in other jurisdictions have been sanctioned by courts for filing submissions containing invented authorities. Every output must be verified against the primary source, and a lawyer who cites what he has not read is at fault whether a machine or a clerk produced it.
2. Bias. A system trained on past decisions learns the patterns in them, including the discrimination the law is trying to remove, and then reproduces it with the appearance of objectivity. Predictive tools used abroad in bail and sentencing have been shown to produce different results by race.

7. Deepfakes and the authenticity of evidence. Generated audio, images and video make it possible to manufacture apparently conclusive evidence, which raises hard questions for the law of evidence and for the certificate requirement for electronic records confirmed in Arjun Panditrao Khotkar v. Kailash Kushanrao Gorantyal (2020).
8. The effect on entry to the profession. The work AI does best, research, review, first drafts, is precisely the work by which juniors learn. A profession that automates its apprenticeship has a problem it will not notice for ten years.

THE LINE THE LAW HAS DRAWN. AI may assist; it may not decide. Indian courts have used it as a reference tool and have said expressly that such use is for reference only and forms no part of the reasoning. That is right in principle for a reason that goes beyond technology: judicial discretion is a responsibility placed on a person who is accountable, must give reasons, and can be appealed against. A machine has none of those attributes, and the day it did, it would be a judge and not a tool.

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.

Facts. Bhanwari Devi was a saathin, a village-level social worker employed in the Government of Rajasthan's Women's Development Programme. In the course of her work she attempted 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. She met obstruction at every stage: the police were reluctant to record the complaint and the medical examination was delayed, and in 1995 the trial court acquitted the accused. The State's appeal against that acquittal has remained pending in the Rajasthan High Court.

1. Sexual harassment at the workplace is a violation of fundamental rights. It infringes the right to equality under Articles 14 and 15; the right to practise any profession or to carry on any occupation under Article 19(1)(g), because a hostile environment drives women out of work; and the right to life with dignity under Article 21.
2. International law may fill a domestic vacuum. In the absence of domestic legislation, international conventions consistent with the fundamental rights and ratified by India may be read into Articles 14, 15, 19 and 21, drawing on Article 51(c), which directs the State to foster respect for international law and treaty obligations, and Article 253, which empowers Parliament to legislate to implement treaties. This is the case's lasting contribution to constitutional method, and it is cited far beyond the field of harassment.
3. The Court laid down guidelines binding under Article 141 and directed that they be observed "until suitable legislation is enacted to occupy the field".

The guidelines.

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.
7. Complaints Committee. It must be headed by a woman, with not less than half its members women, and must involve a third party, such as a non-governmental organisation familiar with the issue, to prevent undue pressure from senior levels; it must submit an annual report to the Government.
8. Workers' initiative. Employees must be allowed to raise the issue at workers' meetings and other appropriate forums, and it must be affirmatively discussed in employer-employee meetings.
9. Awareness. Awareness of the rights of female employees must be created by prominently notifying the guidelines.
10. Third parties. Where the act is committed by a person other than an employee, the employer must take necessary and reasonable steps to assist the affected person.
11. Government action. The Central and State Governments should consider adopting suitable measures, including legislation, to ensure that private employers observe the guidelines.

(The paper prints "Actus de nemini facit injuriam". The maxim is actus Dei nemini facit injuriam.)

The maxim means "an act of God does injury to no one", that is, no person is held liable in law for a loss caused by an act of God, because the loss is caused by natural forces for which no human being is answerable.

What an "act of God" is. An event due to natural causes, directly and exclusively, without human intervention, which could not have been prevented by any amount of foresight, pains and care reasonably to be expected. It is also called vis major, "a greater force", in Roman and English law, and damnum fatale, "loss by fate", in Scots law.

The two essential ingredients, and both must be established:

1. The event must be the result of natural forces without any human intervention; and
2. it must be extraordinary, and not one that could reasonably have been anticipated and guarded against.

• Kallulal v. Hemchand (1968): a wall of the respondent's building collapsed on a day of heavy rainfall, killing the appellant's children. The rainfall recorded was 2.66 inches. Held: the defence failed, because rainfall of that order is not extraordinary in that place and season, and the collapse was attributable to the condition of the building.
• Rylands v. Fletcher (1868) is the frame within which the defence operates: the rule of strict liability for the escape of a dangerous thing brought on to land is subject to five recognised exceptions, of which act of God is one, the others being the plaintiff's own default, the act of a stranger, the plaintiff's consent, and statutory authority.

WHERE THE MAXIM OPERATES.

1. As a general defence in tort, and specifically as an exception to the rule in Rylands v. Fletcher.

THE CRUCIAL LIMIT: absolute liability. The defence is not available at all against the rule of absolute liability laid down in M. C. Mehta v. Union of India (1987), the Oleum Gas Leak case, under which an enterprise carrying on a hazardous or inherently dangerous activity is liable for harm resulting from it without any of the exceptions that qualify strict liability. A chemical plant cannot answer a gas escape by pleading an earthquake.

2. That a statute is prospective and not retrospective. Nova constitutio futuris formam imponere debet, non praeteritis: a new law regulates what is to follow, not the past. A statute is construed as prospective unless it says otherwise expressly or by necessary implication. Exceptions: procedural statutes are presumed retrospective, because no one has a vested right in a form of procedure; and declaratory and curative statutes are retrospective, because they state what the law always was. Article 20(1) puts an absolute bar on retrospective criminal liability. Keshavan Madhava Menon v. State of Bombay (1951).

3. That the legislature knows the existing law and does not intend to alter it further than it says. A statute is presumed not to change the existing law, whether statutory or common law, beyond what its words require, and not to take away vested rights without clear words. It follows that implied repeal is not favoured, and that where a general Act and an earlier special Act cover the same ground the special prevails: generalia specialibus non derogant.

4. That the legislature does not intend what is unjust, inconvenient, unreasonable or absurd. This is the foundation of the golden rule, and it permits a court to modify the literal meaning where it would produce such a result, but no further: Grey v. Pearson (1857).

9. That the jurisdiction of the civil courts is not ousted except by clear words or necessary implication, and that a provision purporting to exclude judicial review is construed narrowly. This follows from the constitutional position that judicial review is part of the basic structure: Minerva Mills v. Union of India (1980).

10. That a statute is exhaustive on the subject with which it deals, so that a code is presumed to contain the whole of the law on its topic and is not to be supplemented from outside.

11. That the legislature does not intend to violate international law or India's treaty obligations, so that a construction consistent with a convention India has ratified is preferred: Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan (1997).

12. Omnia praesumuntur rite esse acta: official acts are presumed to have been regularly and correctly performed, and a public officer is presumed to have acted within his authority, until the contrary is shown.

13. That a remedy is not taken away without an alternative, and that where a right is created a remedy is intended, which is ubi jus ibi remedium operating as a presumption.