The High Court at Calcutta Direct Recruitment to the cadre of District Judge in from the Members of the Bar/Limited Competitive Examination, 2017

Paper I

Full Marks : 100

Time : 3 hours

A) Write Essays on any three of the following subjects: – 15×3

1)   Equity will not allow a remedy that is contrary to law.

2) Justice must not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.

3) Life imprisonment vs. Death sentence,
4) Gender discrimination cannot be eradicated without ‘affirmative action’.

B) Make a precis from any one of the following passages:  25

1) Identity theft is one of the biggest threats that an individual faces today. It can happen when cyber thieves steal your personal information or trick you into sharing personal details. This may include obtaining your name, father’s name, date of birth, address, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, etc. The details are pieced together to create a matching identity, which the thieves then use to get access to your bank account
and withdraw money, secure government benefits such as loans in your name or take control of your credit card by changing your address without your knowledge. They even impersonate you on social media, causing embarrassment.

Phishing is a homonym for fishing, and is objective is to trick a web user to unknowingly furnish valuable financial information. The phishing attacks are primarily carried out through smartly crafted e-mails. These appear to have been sent by the recipient”s bank, credit card company or even someone trustworthy.

The goal is to trick the recipient to click on the company’s official email link. The “official” link, however, takes the recipient to a fake website, where the user without realizing enters his credit card number, password, etc.

Smart cyber thieves scour- social media sites to get personal information about the potential victim. This may include children’s names, schools they go to, etc. The phishing e-mail can come from the “school” asking the victim to furnish bank account details for fee purposes. Such tricks always create extra trust and fool the victim completely.

Phishing attacks are nothing short of a malicious internet epidemic. Worried Indian banks constantly educate their customers through e-mails, SMS messages and newspaper and television ads that they do not collect personal financial information. Yet, there are scores of gullible Indians, who, even today, fall for this cyber trickery.

or

2) The emphasis in law on notions of proof and probability, is also a way of acknowledging that facts are not as concrete as they may seem. All cases, whether Criminal or Civil, are decided according to the burden of proof. This too is a complex subject, and too intricate for full discussion here, though some basic points can be made. The burden of proof places the responsibility for establishing a particular fact on its proponent, so that if A claims that B injured her by his negligent driving, it is up to A to make out a case. The requirement of proof means that facts must be established to the satisfaction of the Court, but this does not mean absolute certainty. As Lord Guthrie has said: ‘Outside the region of mathematics, proof is never anything more than probability’ (Nobel)s Explosive Co. v British Dominions General Insurance Co. (1919) 1 SLT 205 at 206). It will be relatively unusual for facts in a case to be conclusive.

The term conclusive is one which need to be used with great caution. Technically, evidence is only conclusive where, by virtue of a rule of law, it cannot be contradicted – a widely cited example is the rule of law treating a child under the age of 10 as incapable of committing a crime. This technical meaning is thus different from the popular sense of the term, whether it is used to describe evidence that effectively chinches the case.

In reality, what is popularly called ‘conclusive’ is no more than evidence degree of probability. Thus, in coming to a conclusion on the evidence, the court is normally saying no more than : on the facts before us, we are as sure as we feel we need to be’.

The courts have attempted to define the burden of proof in terms of levels of probability; thus in civil cases we conventionally talk of proof ‘on a balance of probabilities’ and in criminal cases of a “higher standard” of ‘proof beyond reasonable doubt’. What these abstract concepts come to mean in individual cases remain open to question. It is widely accepted that such standards of proof are incapable of precise definition, a point to which we shall return later in this chapter. At the same time the use of terms such as ‘proof beyond reasonable doubt’ may often time the work to disguise the extent to which conclusions about the facts of a case are subjective. Put simply, it is not easy to draw the boundaries between doubts which are reasonable, and those which are not.

C) Translate the following two passages into English language: – 15×2

      SEE  THE FULL DOCUMENT

• West Bengal Higher Judicial Service [English Paper Main Examination 2017]

• West Bengal Higher Judicial Service [English Paper Main Examination 2019]

• West Bengal Higher Judicial Service [Preliminary Examination Question Paper 2019]