JGU Id. No.

_____________

O.P. Jindal Global University

Jindal Global Law School
End-term Examination – Semester A

Course name : Advanced Criminal Law: History, Ideology & Power

Course Code : L-EL-0140
Programme : Elective Course
Session : 2016 - 2017
Time Allowed : 3 Hours
Maximum Marks : 50

This question paper has three (3) printed pages (including this page).

Instructions to students:
1. You are required to attempt a total of THREE questions. The first two questions in PART I carry 20
marks each. The third question in Part II carries 10 marks.
2. You will not be marked on the conceptual clarity and application of the conceptual and theoretical
arguments and not merely information.
3. Plagiarism is strictly prohibited. In case you use exact words of any author or source then put them in
quotation marks. If you are paraphrasing in your own words then mention the source of your paraphrase
4. DO NOT write your Name and Student Id. No. anywhere on the answer book except on the space
provided.
5. DO NOT write anything on the question paper except Student Id. No. on the space provided.
6. Start each question on a new page.
7. Use of mobile phone or any electronic storage and access system is prohibited.
8. Students undertaking the examination are requested to adhere to the University norms related to
examinations.

__________________________________________________________________________________________
This is a Closed Book examination. Students are not allowed to bring any material in the Examination Hall.
Warning: Plagiarism in any form is prohibited. Anyone found using unfair means will be penalized
severely.

JGLS [End-term Examination - Semester A, 2016 - 2017] Page 1

 PART I

Question 1: In your engagement with Jacques Derrida’s perspective on Death Penalty, what have you learnt that
is useful in understanding death penalty? Also, comment critically if Derrida provides a critical edge in
understanding the issue of death penalty more acutely that the available literature on death penalty? While
answering your question you must respond to the following issues raised in the reading and class discussion:

- What is his idea to think death penalty in principle beyond any calculations or bargains?
- His invocation of Nietzsche to critique Kant’s notion of ‘just desserts’ or equivalence in crime and
punishment.
- The civilizational or teleological argument of abolitionists critiqued by Derrida.

OR

‘Whence comes this bizarre, bizarre idea,’ Jacques Derrida asks, reading Nietzsche on debt in On
the Genealogy of Morals, ‘this ancient, archaic idea, this so very deeply rooted, perhaps
indestructible idea, of a possible equivalence between injury and pain? Whence comes this strange
hypothesis or presumption of an equivalence between two such incommensurable things? What
can a wrong and a suffering have in common?’ By way of an answer, he points out that ‘the origin
of the legal subject, and notably of penal law, is commercial law; it is the law of commerce, debt,
the market, the exchange between things, bodies and monetary signs, with their general equivalent
and their surplus value, their interest.’
[Judith Butler]

In the light of the above quote from Butler, situate the discussion of Derrida with respect to death penalty. Recall
how Derrida identifies that pain and equivalent recompense of injury (as in Kant) lies in ‘Belief itself’. Discuss
the notion of ‘belief’ in Derrida and how a counter-belief (or a different belief) is possible as Sudhir Kakar learns
in his discussion with Dalai Lama.

While answering this question also discuss why Nietzsche calls Kantian idea of equivalence as “bizarre, bizarre
idea” and why Derrida uses it in the context of Death Penalty.

Question 2: Peter Goodrich made the following observations with respect to Alison Young’s reading of R. v.
Ahluwalia [1992] case:

Although this result might seem, and indeed was, a liberal advance in the common law of murder,
it is predicated upon a highly un-feministic reasoning. Kiranjit Ahluwalia is depicted as slowly
succumbing to a species of madness, an abnormality or simple strangeness that removed her from
the ideal feminine role of wife and mother…

He goes on further to quotes famous lines from Young’s book depicting what he calls the ‘legal image of female
normality’ in the following words:

JGLS [End-term Examination - Semester A, 2016 - 2017] Page 2

 Wherever she turns, Ahluwalia will be lost to us: consumed by flames, or by law imprisoned as
rational and murderous or acquitted as mentally abnormal...In the Court of law, and in the case
report, the flames still burn: they allow the law to call her Other, foreign, strange. In her acquittal,
she is still imprisoned, sacrificed in the law's representation of feminine subjectivity.

Do you agree that the reasoning in Ahluwalia case was ‘un-feminist’? Respond by critically analyzing this point.
Further, in the class discussions we discussed how Young borrows Edward Said’s notion Orientalism in reading
this case and emphasizing on ‘Other, foreign and strange’ representation of Kiranjeet Ahluwalia. In your response,
critically discuss this deployment of logic of Orientalism by Alison Young in reading a criminal case.

OR

‘What do we want when we want to abolish sedition as an offence? Do we want to remove it from
the criminal statute and the battle is won. Or do we want something more that is elusive in the
contemporary discourse against sedition?
’
Respond critically to the above quote by analyzing the constitutional and judicial gloss on the law of sedition in
India. Refer to the discussions in the class as well as the relevant discussion in cases to understand how Indian
courts and law have understood the logic of speech aimed against the nation-state. As a student of criminal law
how do you comment on the existing debate with respect to sedition in India legally and politically?

PART II

Question 3: Identify the quotes given below from the readings and briefly respond to any ONE of the following
as a short note. You can decide to comment on any aspect of the quote and give your opinion as well. [Do not
exceed more than two sides of the answer script in any case]

1. ‘Was it an offence to be interpreted and punished according to the Indian Penal Code or was it to be
justified by a code of social morality that provides for a minimum subsistence as an overriding right?’

2. ‘The abstract individualism of the reformer’s ideology (‘juridical economic man’) makes it inadequate
either to comprehend or control the reality of crime…The penal code’s ideology of abstract individualism
and consensual sociality doomed it to inefficacy. Yet it was this ideology that came to inform Anglo-
American criminal law’

3. ‘She willingly accompanied him and the law did not cast upon him the duty of taking her back to her
father's house or even of telling her not to accompany him. She was not a child of tender years who was
unable to think for herself…[But] on the verge if attaining majority and was capable of knowing what
was bad for her. She was no uneducated or unsophisticated village girl but a senior college student who
had probably all her life lived in a modern city and was thus far more capable of thinking for herself and
acting on her own than perhaps an unlettered girl hailing form a rural area.’

JGLS [End-term Examination - Semester A, 2016 - 2017] Page 3