BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 5 Legal Language 2023-24 - ATKT 75/25 Question Paper with Solutions

Legislative materials are the documents produced by the legislature and by the authorities to which it delegates power, which together make up the enacted law and the record of how it came to be enacted. They fall into two groups.

1. The law itself, the primary and subordinate legislation: the Constitution; Acts of Parliament and of the State Legislatures; Ordinances promulgated by the President or a Governor; and the subordinate legislation made under an Act, that is rules, regulations, orders, bye-laws, schemes and notifications published in the Official Gazette.

2. The legislative history, used as external aids to interpretation: the Bill as introduced, the Statement of Objects and Reasons, the reports of Select and Joint Committees, the reports of the Law Commission and of other commissions on which the Bill was founded, and the parliamentary debates.

Two, with what each does and India's position:

1. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), 1979, often called the international bill of rights for women. It requires States to eliminate discrimination against women in political, economic, social, cultural and civil life. India ratified it in 1993, and the Supreme Court relied on it in Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan (1997) to read the obligation to prevent sexual harassment at the workplace into Articles 14, 15, 19 and 21.
2. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), 1966, which guarantees the right to life, liberty, fair trial, freedom of expression, assembly and association, and freedom from torture. India ratified it in 1979.

Others that may be named: the Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989 (India ratified 1992); the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1966; the Geneva Conventions, 1949, on the law of armed conflict; the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, 1969; and the United Nations Convention against Torture, 1984, which India has signed but not ratified.

Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, defines the offence of SEDITION. It provides that whoever, by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards, the Government established by law in India, commits sedition. It is punishable with imprisonment for life, or imprisonment up to three years, with fine.

The section carries three Explanations: "disaffection" includes disloyalty and all feelings of enmity; and comments disapproving of the measures or the administrative action of the Government, without exciting or attempting to excite hatred, contempt or disaffection, do not constitute the offence.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of a computer system to perform tasks which ordinarily require human intelligence, such as learning from data, reasoning, recognising patterns, understanding and generating natural language, perceiving images and speech, and making decisions or predictions.

It is conventionally divided into:

• Narrow or weak AI, designed for a specific task, which is what exists today: search, translation, speech recognition, recommendation, and the large language models used for text; and
• General or strong AI, a hypothetical system with the general reasoning ability of a human being, which does not exist.

Machine learning is the branch of AI in which a system learns rules from data rather than being programmed with them, and generative AI is the branch that produces new text, images or code.

Article 14 provides: "The State shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of India."

It contains two expressions, and they are not the same thing:

1. "Equality before the law", taken from the English common law and Dicey's rule of law, is a negative concept: the absence of any special privilege in favour of any person, and the equal subjection of all to the ordinary law administered by the ordinary courts.
2. "Equal protection of the laws", taken from the Fourteenth Amendment to the American Constitution, is a positive concept: like should be treated alike, that is, equality of treatment in equal circumstances.

The doctrine of reasonable classification. Article 14 forbids class legislation but permits reasonable classification. A classification is valid only if it satisfies two tests, laid down in State of West Bengal v. Anwar Ali Sarkar (1952) and settled in Ram Krishna Dalmia v. Justice S. R. Tendolkar (1958):

Citation. K. M. Nanavati v. State of Maharashtra, AIR 1962 SC 605.

The facts. Commander Kawas Manekshaw Nanavati, an officer of the Indian Navy, was posted at Bombay. On his return from sea in April 1959 his wife Sylvia confessed to him that she had formed an adulterous relationship with Prem Bhagwandas Ahuja, a Bombay businessman and a friend of the family. Nanavati dropped his wife and children at a cinema, drove to his ship, obtained a revolver and six rounds on a false pretext, drove to Ahuja's office and then to his flat, and shot Ahuja dead on 27 April 1959. He then drove to the Provost Marshal and surrendered.

The trial. He was tried at the Bombay Sessions Court before a jury, which returned a verdict of not guilty by eight to one. The Sessions Judge considered the verdict perverse, that is, one no reasonable body of persons could have reached on the evidence, and referred the case to the Bombay High Court. The High Court set aside the verdict, convicted Nanavati of murder and sentenced him to imprisonment for life. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction in 1962.

• The Governor purported to suspend the sentence while the appeal was pending, and the Supreme Court held that the executive's power of pardon under Article 161 cannot be exercised so as to interfere with a matter sub judice before the Court. Nanavati was eventually pardoned by the Governor in 1964.

Its lasting significance. It is remembered as the last jury trial of note in India. The verdict was widely regarded as showing that a jury could be swayed by public sympathy and press campaigning, and jury trial, already being withdrawn from Indian criminal procedure, disappeared altogether; the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, makes no provision for trial by jury.

The trial of 1908. Tilak was tried for two articles in Kesari on the Muzaffarpur bomb, in which Khudiram Bose's bomb killed two Englishwomen. He was charged under Sections 124A and 153A. The trial was in the Bombay High Court before Justice Davar, with a special jury. Tilak conducted his own defence, addressing the court for more than twenty hours over several days. The jury found him guilty by seven to two, the two dissentients being the Indian jurors, and he was sentenced to six years' transportation and a fine, and deported to Mandalay in Burma, where he wrote the Gita Rahasya.

His statement after the verdict is the sentence the syllabus expects you to know: "In spite of the verdict of the jury, I maintain that I am innocent. There are higher powers that rule the destiny of things, and it may be the will of Providence that the cause which I represent may prosper more by my suffering than by my remaining free."

The trial of 1916. After his return, Tilak was again proceeded against for speeches on Home Rule. He was defended by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and the proceedings failed.

1. Freedom of speech and its limits. Speech on social media is protected by Article 19(1)(a), subject to the reasonable restrictions in Article 19(2): the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, contempt of court, defamation, and incitement to an offence. In Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) the Supreme Court struck down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, which had penalised sending "grossly offensive" or "menacing" messages, holding it vague and overbroad, and drew the distinction that governs the field: advocacy is protected; only incitement may be punished. In Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India (2020) the Court held that the freedom of speech and of trade through the internet is constitutionally protected and that indefinite suspension of internet services is impermissible.

5. Trial by media, where a case is decided in public before it is decided in court, which strikes at the presumption of innocence and at the fairness of the trial.

(a) The writ is HABEAS CORPUS.

Habeas corpus means "you may have the body". It is a writ issued to a person who is detaining another, commanding him to produce the detained person before the court and to justify the detention. If the detention is found to be without legal authority, the court orders the immediate release of the person detained.

Applied to these facts:

1. Suraj has been illegally detained, that is, detained without the authority of law. Habeas corpus is the remedy designed precisely for that.

• Criminal prosecution of the officer, for wrongful confinement and for voluntarily causing hurt, and for causing hurt to extort a confession, which is a distinct and graver offence in Indian penal law.
• Departmental action, and a complaint to the National or State Human Rights Commission under the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993.
• A civil suit in tort for assault, battery and false imprisonment, which is not barred by the public law award but is adjusted against it.

(b) Who may apply, and under which article.

Who may apply. Suraj himself, or any other person on his behalf. In habeas corpus the ordinary rule of locus standi is relaxed, precisely because a person in illegal custody is in no position to file anything. A relative, a friend, a lawyer, a social worker or any member of the public acting bona fide may move the court. The Court has also accepted a letter or a postcard as a petition, the epistolary jurisdiction established in S. P. Gupta v. Union of India (1981) and used in D. K. Basu itself, which began as a letter to the Chief Justice.

Under which article.

(a) Yes. The petition is maintainable.

The ground is cruelty, under Section 13(1)(ia) of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, which allows either party to a marriage to present a petition for divorce on the ground that the other party "has, after the solemnisation of the marriage, treated the petitioner with cruelty."

The facts disclose cruelty of the clearest kind:

1. Physical violence. Beating a wife mercilessly and daily is physical cruelty, and no further proof of injury to health is needed; a single act of serious violence suffices, and a course of conduct is overwhelming.

• There is no period of limitation for a petition on the ground of cruelty, and continuing cruelty gives a fresh cause of action from day to day. The delay between the marriage and the petition is therefore no answer, though the court will consider whether the conduct has been condoned; continuing daily violence makes condonation impossible to establish.
• Jurisdiction is governed by Section 19: the petition lies where the marriage was solemnised, where the respondent resides, where the parties last resided together, or where the wife is residing at the date of presentation, that last option having been inserted for her benefit.

(b) The law that applies, and why.

The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, applies, because the marriage was solemnised under Hindu law between Hindus. Section 2 of the Act makes it applicable to any person who is a Hindu, Buddhist, Jain or Sikh by religion, and to any person domiciled in India who is not a Muslim, Christian, Parsi or Jew. Divorce is governed by Section 13, and the ground here is Section 13(1)(ia).

Maya is not confined to divorce, and a complete answer sets out the other remedies:

a) What are the various rights violated in the above case? b) As a student of law, what advice will you fine to Sheetal?

(a) The rights violated.

1. The right to life under Article 21, which the Supreme Court has held to include the right to live in a healthy environment and to the enjoyment of pollution-free water and air: Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar (1991). Accumulated garbage causing a stench and illness is a direct infringement of it.
2. The right to health, read into Article 21, and infringed here in the most literal way, since people have actually fallen ill.

First, the quickest and cheapest: an application to the Magistrate under the public nuisance provision. What was Section 133 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, now Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, empowers a District Magistrate, Sub-Divisional Magistrate or Executive Magistrate to make a conditional order requiring the removal of a public nuisance, including the removal of any injurious substance or the regulation of any trade or occupation injurious to the health or physical comfort of the community. This is exactly the remedy used in the leading case, and it does not require a lawyer or a large fee.

Second, a public interest litigation in the High Court under Article 226, seeking a writ of mandamus commanding the Corporation to discharge its statutory duty of removing the refuse, together with a direction for compensation and for a scheme to prevent recurrence. Sheetal may file on behalf of the residents; locus standi is relaxed in public interest litigation since S. P. Gupta v. Union of India (1981). An application to the National Green Tribunal under the National Green Tribunal Act, 2010 is an alternative, since the Solid Waste Management Rules are made under a scheduled enactment.

(a) No. Rashmi cannot apply under the Scheduled Caste category.

Caste status is determined by birth, not by marriage. A person born into a forward caste does not become a member of a Scheduled Caste by marrying into it, and cannot claim the benefit of reservation in employment or education on the strength of that marriage.

The reasons are three:

1. Article 341 of the Constitution empowers the President to specify, by public notification, the castes, races or tribes which shall be deemed to be Scheduled Castes in relation to a State. Membership of a specified community is a matter of birth into it, and no private act of the parties can alter what a Presidential Order records.

Valsamma Paul v. Cochin University, (1996) 3 SCC 545. A woman born a Syrian Christian, a forward community, married a Latin Catholic, a backward class, and claimed appointment to a reserved post on the strength of the marriage. The Supreme Court held that she was not entitled to it, saying that reservation is meant for those who have suffered the social and economic disabilities from birth, that a person who marries into a backward class does not acquire the handicaps the reservation exists to remedy, and that to allow the claim would defeat the constitutional object.

Sunita Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh (2018) is even closer to these facts: a woman born a Brahmin married a man belonging to a Scheduled Caste and obtained a Scheduled Caste certificate. The Supreme Court held that caste is determined by birth and cannot be changed by marriage, and set the certificate aside.

What it is. A Uniform Civil Code is a single body of law governing personal matters, marriage, divorce, maintenance, guardianship, adoption, succession and inheritance, applying to all citizens alike, in place of the separate personal laws that presently apply according to religion.

The constitutional basis. Article 44, a Directive Principle: "The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India." Being a Directive Principle it is not enforceable by any court, but it is fundamental in the governance of the country, and the State has a duty to apply it in making laws.

1. Equality and non-discrimination. Personal laws contain provisions that treat men and women differently in marriage, divorce, guardianship and inheritance, and a uniform code would bring Articles 14 and 15 to bear on the area where inequality is most deeply entrenched.
2. The dignity of women. This has been the engine of the judicial pressure for a code, from Mohd. Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum (1985), through Sarla Mudgal v. Union of India (1995) and John Vallamattom v. Union of India (2003), in each of which the Supreme Court regretted that Article 44 had remained a dead letter.
3. National integration, by removing a standing marker of separate legal identity.
4. Simplicity and certainty, and the end of conflicts between personal laws. In Sarla Mudgal and Lily Thomas v. Union of India (2000) men converted to Islam in order to marry again; the Court held it bigamy, and a common code removes the incentive altogether.
5. Precedent within India. Hindu law was codified and radically reformed between 1955 and 1956 in the teeth of fierce opposition, and the reforms are now uncontroversial.

The case against.

4. Uniformity is not the same as equality. A code could be uniform and still unjust; what women in every community actually need is the removal of the discriminatory rules, and that can be done inside each personal law.
5. The 21st Law Commission, in its consultation paper of 2018, concluded that a Uniform Civil Code was "neither necessary nor desirable at this stage", and recommended the piecemeal reform of discriminatory provisions within each personal law instead. The 22nd Law Commission invited fresh views in 2023.

A way forward. Reform each personal law of its discriminatory provisions first; build on the Special Marriage Act, 1954, which already exists and already works; make the code optional at first, so that citizens may opt into it; exempt or specially provide for the Scheduled Tribes and consult the autonomous councils; legislate subject by subject, beginning with the uncontroversial ones such as compulsory registration of all marriages and a common minimum age of marriage, and leaving succession to last; and draw the best rule from each system rather than adopting the majority's, so that the code is visibly common property.

The facts. On 25 May 2020, at Minneapolis in the State of Minnesota, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was arrested by police officers on suspicion of having passed a counterfeit twenty-dollar note at a shop. During the arrest Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for more than nine minutes while Floyd lay handcuffed and face down on the road, repeatedly saying "I can't breathe", until he lost consciousness and died. Three other officers were present: Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao, two of whom restrained Floyd and one of whom kept bystanders back.

The evidence. The whole incident was recorded on a mobile telephone by a bystander, a teenaged girl, and the recording was published. It contradicted the police department's initial statement, which described a man dying after a "medical incident during police interaction". The video, and the footage from the officers' body cameras and from nearby cameras, was the case.

The consequences. The recording produced the largest protests in modern American history, under the banner of Black Lives Matter, and demonstrations in many other countries.

1. Custodial death and the accountability of the police. This is the subject of D. K. Basu v. State of West Bengal (1997), in which the Supreme Court called custodial torture "a naked violation of human dignity" and laid down eleven safeguards to be observed at every arrest, and of Nilabati Behera v. State of Orissa (1993), which established compensation in public law for a custodial death, to which sovereign immunity is no defence. The Indian jurisprudence is, on paper, as strong as any in the world.

2. The difference is in what happens next. The Chauvin prosecution moved from death to conviction in eleven months. In India, custodial deaths are recorded in the hundreds every year and convictions of police officers are very few, and the reasons are structural: the investigation is conducted by the same force, medical examination is often delayed or perfunctory, and witnesses are in custody or afraid. This is precisely why D. K. Basu attacked the problem through evidence, requiring a memo of arrest attested by a witness, an inspection memo recording injuries at the moment of arrest, and medical examination every 48 hours.

The guarantee. Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution gives all citizens the right to freedom of speech and expression. It is available only to citizens, not to a corporation as such, and it is subject to Article 19(2), under which the State may impose reasonable restrictions in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.

What the right includes, as the courts have developed it:

1. The right to express one's own views by word, writing, print, picture, film or any other medium.
2. The right to receive and to circulate information, including the freedom of the press, which has no separate mention in the Constitution and is an aspect of Article 19(1)(a): Romesh Thappar v. State of Madras (1950), Sakal Papers v. Union of India (1962), Bennett Coleman v. Union of India (1973).

What the Court held.

1. Articles 14, 19 and 21 are not mutually exclusive. This is the central holding and it overruled the reasoning of A. K. Gopalan v. State of Madras (1950), which had treated each right as occupying a separate compartment. The Court held that a law depriving a person of personal liberty must satisfy Article 21, and must also satisfy Articles 14 and 19 if it touches them. This is the "golden triangle".

2. "Procedure established by law" in Article 21 must be fair, just and reasonable. A procedure that is arbitrary, fanciful or oppressive is no procedure at all. The Court thereby read into the Indian Constitution much of what American law calls due process, without using the phrase the framers had deliberately rejected.

3. The right to travel abroad is part of "personal liberty" under Article 21, and the power to impound a passport must therefore be exercised by a fair procedure, including, ordinarily, a hearing and the giving of reasons. The Court read the principles of natural justice into Section 10(3)(c).

1. It internationalised the right. Before Maneka Gandhi the freedom of speech was assumed to operate within India; after it, an executive act that prevents a citizen from speaking, gathering information or communicating abroad is a restriction on Article 19(1)(a) and must be justified.
2. It made procedure part of reasonableness, so that a restriction on speech imposed without notice, hearing or reasons is bad even if the ground would have been good.
3. It made the golden triangle available in free-speech cases, so that a law restricting speech must be tested for arbitrariness under Article 14 as well as for reasonableness under Article 19(2). Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) used exactly this combination to strike down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 as vague and overbroad, holding that discussion and advocacy are protected and only incitement may be punished.

2. Translation, which matters more in India than anywhere else. The Supreme Court's SUVAS, the Vidhik Anuvaad Software, translates judgments into Indian languages. Article 348 requires the higher courts to work in English, and most litigants do not read English, so translation is not a convenience but a question of access to justice.
3. Court administration and pendency. SUPACE, the Supreme Court Portal for Assistance in Court's Efficiency, launched in April 2021, is designed to help judges extract and organise the relevant material from voluminous case files. The eCourts project uses technology for filing, scheduling and case management. With tens of millions of cases pending, any tool that reduces the time spent on the mechanical parts of a case has a direct effect on delay.
4. Document review and due diligence. In large commercial matters, reviewing thousands of contracts for a particular clause is exactly the kind of repetitive classification a machine does better and cheaper than a junior lawyer.
5. Drafting. Generating first drafts of contracts, notices, pleadings and opinions from precedents, for a lawyer to correct.

2. Bias. A system trained on past decisions learns the patterns in them, including the discrimination the law is trying to remove. Predictive tools used in sentencing and bail abroad have been shown to produce different results by race. A system trained on Indian data would learn Indian inequalities.
3. Opacity. Many systems cannot explain why they produced a particular output. A decision affecting rights must be supported by reasons, and that is a rule of natural justice, so an unexplainable system cannot lawfully decide anything.
4. Accountability. If an AI-assisted step causes loss, who answers for it? The present answer is that the lawyer or the authority remains responsible, and the tool is no defence.
5. Confidentiality and data protection. Feeding a client's papers into a third-party service may breach both the duty of confidence and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.

Conclusion. The importance of artificial intelligence in law is that it removes the mechanical part of legal work, and the mechanical part is most of it. Searching, translating, reviewing, summarising and drafting are all tasks it does faster and more cheaply than a human being, and in a system with the pendency and the language barrier that India has, that is not a marginal gain. What it cannot do is judge, because judgment requires the weighing of incommensurable considerations by someone who can be held to account for the result. The right posture is neither refusal nor delegation, but supervised use: the machine drafts and the lawyer verifies; the machine sorts and the judge decides.

• Article 15(4), inserted by the First Amendment, 1951, after State of Madras v. Champakam Dorairajan (1951): special provision for the advancement of socially and educationally backward classes and of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
• Article 15(5), inserted by the Ninety-third Amendment, 2005: reservation in educational institutions including private unaided institutions, other than minority institutions.
• Article 16(4): reservation of appointments in favour of any backward class not adequately represented in the services of the State.
• Article 16(4A), inserted by the Seventy-seventh Amendment, 1995: reservation in promotion for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Article 16(4B), by the Eighty-first Amendment, 2000: carry-forward of unfilled reserved vacancies without regard to the ceiling.
• Article 17: abolition of untouchability. Article 46: a Directive Principle requiring the State to promote with special care the educational and economic interests of the weaker sections, and in particular of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

• Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992), the Mandal case, nine judges, the leading authority. It upheld 27 per cent reservation for other backward classes; confirmed the 50 per cent ceiling save in extraordinary situations; excluded the "creamy layer" for other backward classes; held that reservation in promotion is not permissible under Article 16(4), which produced the Seventy-seventh Amendment; and held that backwardness must be social and educational.
• M. Nagaraj v. Union of India (2006): upheld Articles 16(4A) and 16(4B), but required the State, before reserving in promotion, to collect quantifiable data on backwardness, inadequacy of representation and efficiency under Article 335.
• Jarnail Singh v. Lachhmi Narain Gupta (2018): modified Nagaraj, holding that no data on the backwardness of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes need be collected, since their backwardness is presumed by their being scheduled, but that the creamy layer principle applies to them in promotions.
• Janhit Abhiyan v. Union of India (2022): upheld, four to one, the 103rd Amendment, 2019, giving 10 per cent reservation to economically weaker sections, and held that this quota stands outside the 50 per cent ceiling.

The criticisms, stated fairly. That the benefits are captured by the better-off within the community, which is the reason for the creamy layer doctrine; that the lists have become politically unrevisable, since communities are added and almost never removed; the efficiency argument under Article 335, which the Court has said must be balanced rather than used as a veto; and, the most serious, that reservation addresses entry and not the conditions that produce inequality. A college seat is of little use to a child who never reached a functioning school, and Indian policy has too often used reservation as a substitute for primary education and land reform rather than as a complement to them.

Conclusion. Reservation is not an exception to equality but the means by which a formally equal Constitution was made to operate on a radically unequal society. Its constitutional foundation is secure and its results are real. What remains contested is not whether it is justified but how it should be targeted, which is exactly what the creamy layer doctrine, the 50 per cent ceiling and the periodic re-examination of the lists exist to decide.

1. The literal or grammatical rule (the plain meaning rule). Where the words of a statute are plain, clear and unambiguous, they must be given their ordinary, natural and grammatical meaning, whatever the consequence. The classical statement is in the Sussex Peerage Case (1844). Its corollaries are the rule against a casus omissus, that a court cannot supply an omission, and the rule that every word must be given effect and none treated as superfluous.

Illustration: in Motipur Zamindary Co. v. State of Bihar the question was whether sugarcane was a "green vegetable" for the purpose of a sales tax exemption. The court applied the ordinary popular meaning: a vegetable is what is grown in a kitchen garden for the table, and sugarcane is not, so no exemption.

2. The golden rule. The literal meaning may be departed from where it would lead to absurdity, repugnance or inconsistency with the rest of the statute, and the words may then be modified so far as is necessary "but no farther": Lord Wensleydale in Grey v. Pearson (1857).

Illustration: Venkataramana Devaru v. State of Mysore (1958), reconciling Article 25(2)(b), allowing the State to throw Hindu religious institutions open to all classes, with Article 26(b), giving a denomination the right to manage its own affairs in matters of religion, by holding that the denomination retained the right to exclude the general public on certain special ceremonial occasions while the temple was otherwise open.

THE SECONDARY OR SUBSIDIARY RULES.

• Ejusdem generis, "of the same kind": general words following an enumeration of specific things are confined to the genus disclosed by those things. "Houses, offices, rooms and other places" means other places of the same kind.
• Noscitur a sociis, "a word is known by the company it keeps": a doubtful word takes colour from the words around it.
• Expressio unius est exclusio alterius: the express mention of one thing excludes another.
• Reddendo singula singulis: each phrase is applied to the subject to which it properly relates.