BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 5 Legal Language 2025-26 - ATKT 60/40 Question Paper with Solutions

The accused was arrested by the police last night.

Alas! The old man is no more.

(Equally acceptable: Alas, the old man is no more.)

She loves everyone.

(Equally acceptable: She likes everybody.)

One India One People is an English-language monthly magazine published from Mumbai by the One India One People Foundation, started in 1997 by the industrialist Sadanand A. Shetty. Any two of the following are features of it:

1. It is a national-integration magazine. Its declared object is to promote unity in diversity, and to hold up the rights and, above all, the duties of the citizen under the Constitution.
2. Every issue is built around a single theme. The cover story takes up one national question, education, water, the girl child, the judiciary, defence, and the articles inside are commissioned around it rather than gathered at random.

1. S.C.C. = Supreme Court Cases, the law report of the decisions of the Supreme Court of India, published by the Eastern Book Company, Lucknow, since 1969. It is a private publication and is the report most often cited in the courts today.
2. I.L.R. = Indian Law Reports, published by the State Governments under the Indian Law Reports Act, 1875, reporting the decisions of the High Courts in series named after each court: ILR Bombay, ILR Calcutta, ILR Madras, ILR Allahabad. It is the official report of the High Courts.

Nemo tenetur seipsum accusare means "no one is bound to accuse himself." It is the privilege against self-incrimination, and in India it is a fundamental right.

Article 20(3) of the Constitution: "No person accused of any offence shall be compelled to be a witness against himself."

Three ingredients must be present: the person must be accused of an offence; there must be compulsion; and the compulsion must be to be a witness against himself.

De minimis non curat lex, printed on the paper as "De Minimus", 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.

(1) CAUSE OF ACTION.

A cause of action is the bundle of essential facts which the plaintiff must prove in order to succeed, that is, every fact which, if traversed, it would be necessary for him to prove in order to support his right to the judgment of the court. The classical statement is that of Lord Esher in Read v. Brown (1888), in those words. It does not include the evidence by which those facts are proved, nor the defence.

Where it matters in practice:

1. The plaint must state it. Order VII Rule 1(e) of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, requires the plaint to set out the facts constituting the cause of action and when it arose; and Order VII Rule 11 requires a plaint that discloses no cause of action to be rejected.
2. It fixes territorial jurisdiction. Section 20 of the Code allows a suit to be filed where the defendant resides or carries on business, or where the cause of action wholly or in part arises.

Formalities. It must be in writing, signed and stamped; and where it is executed before a notary, a magistrate or a consular officer, Section 85 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, now the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, raises a presumption of due execution, relieving the party relying on it of proving the signature.

Construction. A power of attorney is construed strictly: the attorney has only the authority expressly conferred and what is necessarily incidental to it. A power to manage does not include a power to sell, and a power to sell does not include a power to mortgage.

Revocation. It may be revoked by the principal before the authority is exercised, and is terminated automatically by the death, insanity or insolvency of the principal. It is irrevocable where the authority is coupled with an interest: Section 202 of the Indian Contract Act.

Currency. In Suraj Lamp & Industries Pvt Ltd v. State of Haryana (2012) the Supreme Court held that the "SA/GPA/WILL" method of transferring immovable property does not convey title: a transfer can be effected only by a registered deed of conveyance, and a power of attorney is not an instrument of transfer but a document of agency.

1. HABEAS CORPUS, "you may have the body". Issued to a person detaining another, requiring him to produce the detained person before the court and to justify the detention; if the detention is unlawful, the person is released. It is the great remedy for personal liberty; it lies against the State and against private persons; locus standi is relaxed, so anyone may move it on the detenu's behalf, and the Court has accepted a letter or a postcard as a petition.
2. MANDAMUS, "we command". Issued to a public authority, an inferior court or a tribunal, commanding it to perform a public duty which it has refused or failed to perform. It lies to compel performance of a duty, not to direct how a discretion should be exercised, and it does not lie against a private individual or to enforce a purely contractual obligation.
3. PROHIBITION. Issued by a superior court to an inferior court or tribunal, forbidding it to continue proceedings in excess of its jurisdiction. It is preventive, and lies only while the proceedings are still pending.

Ubi jus ibi remedium means "where there is a right, there is a remedy." It states that the law will not recognise a right without at the same time providing a means of enforcing it, so that wherever the law confers a right, it also confers an action to vindicate that right when it is infringed.

Three propositions follow:

1. A right without a remedy is not a legal right at all, but at most a moral one. The remedy is not an addition to the right; it is what makes the right legal.
2. The absence of a precedent is not an answer. If a legal right has been infringed, the court must find a remedy, and the novelty of the claim is no reason to refuse one.
3. The maxim applies to legal INJURY, not to loss. It presupposes that a legal right has been violated.

In Indian law the maxim is given effect by Section 9 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, under which the civil courts have jurisdiction to try all suits of a civil nature unless barred, and, at the constitutional level, by Article 32, which makes the remedy itself a fundamental right.

34 of 1971) [10 August, 1971] An Act to provide for the termination of certain pregnancies by registered medical practitioners and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto. BE it enacted by the Parliament in the Twenty-second Year of the Republic of India as follows: -

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

THE MATERNITY BENEFIT ACT, 1961 (ACT NO.53 OF 1961) [12th December, 1961] An Act to regulate the employment of women in certain establishments for certain periods before and after child-birth and to provide for maternity benefit and certain other benefits. Be it enacted by Parliament in the Twelfth Year of the Republic of India as follows: -

Step 1. Frame the issue and fix the search terms. The issue is: who is legally capable of entering into a contract, and what is the effect of an agreement made by a person who is not? Search under capacity to contract, competency, minor, majority, unsound mind, disqualified by law, void ab initio, necessaries.

Step 2. Go to the statute first, because it fixes the framework.

• Section 10 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872: all agreements are contracts if made by the free consent of parties competent to contract, for a lawful consideration and with a lawful object, and are not expressly declared void.
• Section 11: "Every person is competent to contract who is of the age of majority according to the law to which he is subject, and who is of sound mind, and is not disqualified from contracting by any law to which he is subject." The section therefore lays down three requirements, and the case law has grown up around each.

The qualifications, from the later cases: a minor may enforce a contract made for his benefit; his estate is liable for necessaries under Section 68, which is a quasi-contractual liability; he cannot ratify on attaining majority; there is no estoppel against him, though equity may order restitution of property still traceable; and he may act as an agent and be admitted to the benefits of a partnership under Section 30 of the Indian Partnership Act, 1932.

(b) Soundness of mind. The test in Section 12 is applied at the moment of contracting, so a person usually of unsound mind may contract during a lucid interval, and a person usually of sound mind may not contract while he is delirious or intoxicated. The burden lies on the person alleging unsoundness.

(c) Disqualification by law. Search for the categories: alien enemies, who cannot contract during a war without licence; foreign sovereigns and diplomats, who may contract but cannot be sued without sanction; insolvents, whose capacity to deal with their property passes to the official assignee until discharge; convicts, while undergoing sentence; and corporations, whose capacity is limited by their constitutive documents and by the doctrine of ultra vires.

THE CASE THAT IT IS THE RIGHT TIME.

1. Equality and dignity. Personal laws treat men and women differently in marriage, divorce, guardianship and inheritance, and a common code would bring Articles 14 and 15 to bear on the area where inequality is most entrenched.
2. The courts have asked for it repeatedly, in Mohd. Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum (1985), 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. The reform is already happening piecemeal, and a code would rationalise it: Shayara Bano (2017) on triple talaq, the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019, Joseph Shine (2018) on adultery, Vineeta Sharma (2020) on daughters as coparceners.
4. It would end the manipulation of personal law. In Sarla Mudgal and Lily Thomas (2000) men converted to Islam in order to marry again; a common code removes the incentive.
5. The precedent exists within India. Hindu law was codified and radically reformed between 1955 and 1956 against fierce opposition, and the reforms are now uncontroversial; Goa has lived under a common code for a century and a half.

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.
6. Timing is itself an argument. A reform of this kind requires consent, and consent is hardest to obtain in a period of communal tension. A code enacted against the settled opposition of a minority would be obeyed under protest and evaded in practice.

A WAY FORWARD, which is what the question's own framing invites.

1. Reform first, unify afterwards. Remove the discriminatory provisions inside each personal law; the objection to a code containing nothing any community has not already accepted is far weaker.
2. Build on the Special Marriage Act, 1954, which already exists and already works.
3. Make it optional first and universal later, with registration of the choice at marriage.
4. Exempt or specially provide for the Scheduled Tribes, and consult the autonomous councils before legislating.

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.

THE ROLE IT ALREADY PLAYS.

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. SCC Online, Manupatra and the free Indian Kanoon have all added AI-assisted search.

6. Predictive analytics, estimating the likely outcome or duration of a matter from past data, useful in advising a client whether to settle.
7. Access to justice. Chatbots and guided interfaces that tell a person what his rights are and what to file. For the very large number of Indians who will never consult a lawyer, this is the application with the greatest potential value.

THE RISKS.

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 abroad have been sanctioned for filing submissions containing invented authorities. Every output must be verified against the primary source.
2. Bias. A system trained on past decisions learns the patterns in them, including the discrimination the law is trying to remove, and reproduces it with the appearance of objectivity.
3. Opacity. Many systems cannot explain their output, yet a decision affecting rights must be supported by reasons, which is a rule of natural justice.

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 for a reason 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.

Conclusion. The role of artificial intelligence in the legal field is to remove the mechanical part of legal work, and the mechanical part is most of it. In a system with India's pendency and India's language barrier that is not a marginal gain. What it cannot do is judge, because judgment means weighing incommensurable considerations and answering 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.

1. Whether custodial death, torture and lock-up violence infringe Articles 21 and 22(1) of the Constitution.
2. What preventive safeguards should attend arrest and detention so as to make that guarantee effective.
3. Whether monetary compensation may be awarded in public law under Articles 32 and 226, and whether sovereign immunity answers such a claim.

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. It explained 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 protection must 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:

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 their particulars must be recorded in a register.

8. The arrestee must be medically examined every 48 hours during custody by a doctor on a panel of approved doctors appointed by the Director, Health Services of the State or Union Territory.
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 fact and place of arrest must be communicated within 12 hours, and where it must be displayed on a conspicuous notice board.

Breach was to attract departmental action and contempt of court, and the requirements are in addition to and not in derogation of other constitutional and statutory safeguards.

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, and in 1995 the trial court acquitted the accused; the State's appeal has remained pending in the Rajasthan High Court.

1. Sexual harassment at the workplace violates fundamental rights: equality under Articles 14 and 15; the right to practise any profession or carry on any occupation under Article 19(1)(g), because a hostile environment drives women out of work; and life with dignity under Article 21.
2. International law may fill a domestic vacuum. In the absence of legislation, international conventions consistent with the fundamental rights and ratified by India may be read into Articles 14, 15, 19 and 21, relying on Article 51(c) and Article 253. This is the case's lasting contribution to constitutional method.
3. The guidelines are binding under Article 141 and operate "until suitable legislation is enacted to occupy the field".

The guidelines.

1. Duty of the employer, in the public and private sectors, to prevent or deter sexual harassment and to provide procedures for the resolution, settlement or prosecution of complaints.

8. Workers' initiative: employees to be allowed to raise the issue at workers' meetings and other forums.
9. Awareness of the rights of female employees, by prominently notifying the guidelines.
10. Third parties. Where the offender is not an employee, the employer must take necessary and reasonable steps to assist the affected person.
11. Government action: the Central and State Governments to consider suitable measures including legislation.

Aftermath. 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, requiring an Internal Complaints Committee in every workplace with ten or more employees and a Local Committee in each district for the unorganised sector, and prescribing the inquiry procedure, time limits, interim reliefs and penalties. The guidelines are therefore no longer the source of the obligation, though the case remains the constitutional foundation on which the Act rests.

What a properly reported case contains, in order: the court and the names of the judges; the parties and the date of judgment; catchwords and a headnote, summarising the facts and the propositions decided, written by the editor; the cases cited; the counsel who appeared; a statement of the facts and the procedural history; the judgments verbatim, including any dissent; and the order with costs.

TWO LAW REPORTS.

(1) All India Reporter (AIR).

• 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 2014 SC 183. No volume number is needed, because AIR paginates each court's volume continuously through the year.

Two others worth a line each. Supreme Court Reports (SCR), the official report published under the authority of the Supreme Court, which should be cited where a case appears in it; and Indian Law Reports (ILR), published by the State Governments under the Indian Law Reports Act, 1875, section 3 of which provides that no court is bound to hear cited, as a report of a High Court decision, any report other than the ILR where one exists. Specialist reports include Cri LJ, ITR, DMC, LLJ and CWN.

Soil pollution, often a result of improper waste disposal and excessive pesticide use, reduces agricultural productivity and enters the food chain. In India, the judiciary has played a proactive role in addressing these issues.

The landmark case M.C. Mehta v.

Union of India, popularly known as the Oleum Gas Leak case, introduced the principle of absolute liability for enterprises engaged in hazardous activities. The Supreme Court held that any entity handling hazardous substances is strictly liable for any harm caused, regardless of negligence or fault.

This judgment paved the way for stricter environmental regulations and the enactment of laws such as the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986. Moreover, the National Green Tribunal (NGT), established in 2010 under the National Green Tribunal Act, provides a specialized forum for expeditious disposal of cases related to environmental protection, conservation of forests and natural resources.

• Water pollution, from untreated sewage and chemical run-off, which devastates aquatic ecosystems and contaminates drinking water sources.
• Soil pollution, often the result of improper waste disposal and excessive pesticide use, which reduces agricultural productivity and enters the food chain.

The passage attributes the rise in all three to the rapid pace of industrialisation and urbanisation in developing nations, and says that it threatens public health, biodiversity and climate stability.

2. Explain the principle of absolute liability as laid down in M. C. Mehta v. Union of India (the Oleum Gas Leak case).

As the passage states it: the case introduced the principle of absolute liability for enterprises engaged in hazardous activities, and the Supreme Court held that any entity handling hazardous substances is strictly liable for any harm caused, regardless of negligence or fault. The passage adds that the judgment paved the way for stricter environmental regulations and for the enactment of laws such as the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986.

As the passage states it: the NGT was established in 2010 under the National Green Tribunal Act, and it:

1. provides a specialised forum for the expeditious disposal of cases relating to environmental protection and the conservation of forests and other natural resources;
2. has powers to grant relief and compensation for damages to persons and property; and
3. has been instrumental in enforcing compliance with environmental laws.

Beyond the passage, it may be added that the Tribunal sits with judicial members and expert members together, which is what makes it "specialised": environmental cases turn on scientific and technical questions that an ordinary court is not equipped to decide. The Supreme Court had suggested exactly such a body in M. C. Mehta itself, so the two answers on this page are connected.

4. According to the passage, why is a multi-pronged approach needed to combat pollution?

Because, in the passage's own words, "despite these legal advancements, challenges persist." It identifies three which the law by itself does not reach:

1. rapid urban growth;