CLAT Legal Reasoning Questions

PRINCIPLE: A law may treat one group differently from another only if two conditions are both met. First, the group must be marked out by a real and identifiable difference. Second, that difference must have a sensible connection to the purpose the law is trying to achieve. A classification failing either condition is invalid.

FACTS: To reduce road accidents, a State bans drivers whose surnames begin with the letters A to M from driving between 8 pm and midnight. The State argues this halves the number of night drivers and so must reduce accidents.

Is the law valid?

PRINCIPLE: Causing death by an act done with the intention of causing death, or with the intention of causing bodily injury that the offender knows is likely to cause death, is the graver offence. Where death is caused without either intention, but by an act done with knowledge that it is likely to cause death, the offence is the lesser one.

FACTS: Dev is demolishing a wall in a crowded lane. He knows people pass constantly and that falling masonry is likely to kill someone, but he wants no one harmed and shouts a warning first. A slab falls and kills a passer-by who did not hear him.

Which offence has Dev committed?

PRINCIPLE: An employer is liable for a wrongful act of an employee committed in the course of employment. An act is in the course of employment if it is a wrongful way of doing something the employee was authorised to do. An employer is not liable where the employee was doing something wholly unconnected with the work.

FACTS: Meher drives a delivery van for a bakery. Told to deliver in the old city, she takes a nine-kilometre detour to visit her sister, and while parked outside her sister’s house she reverses carelessly into a parked car.

Is the bakery liable?

PRINCIPLE: Where an accident is of a kind that does not ordinarily happen without carelessness, and the thing causing it was under the exclusive control of the defendant, carelessness may be inferred without direct proof. The defendant may still displace the inference by showing how the accident happened without any carelessness on their part.

FACTS: A sealed sack of cement falls from the third floor of a warehouse and injures Rehan on the footpath. Only warehouse staff can access that floor. The warehouse offers no explanation for how the sack fell.

How should the court proceed?

PRINCIPLE: Consent is not free where it is obtained by committing or threatening to commit an act forbidden by law, or by unlawfully detaining property, with the intention of making a person enter an agreement. An agreement whose consent was so obtained may be set aside by the party whose consent was not free.

FACTS: A workshop finishes repairing Nandini’s motorcycle. It then refuses to return the motorcycle unless she signs a paper agreeing to pay four times the quoted price. Needing the vehicle for work, she signs, and later applies to set the agreement aside.

What is the outcome?

PRINCIPLE: A contract is induced by undue influence where one party is in a position to dominate the will of the other and uses that position to obtain an unfair advantage. A position to dominate exists where one party holds real or apparent authority over the other, or stands in a fiduciary relation to them, or where the other’s capacity to judge is temporarily or permanently affected by age, illness or distress.

FACTS: Two days after major surgery, and while heavily medicated, Kavita is asked by her physiotherapist to sign a document transferring her scooter to him for a tenth of its value. She signs and later seeks to have the transfer set aside.

What is the position?

PRINCIPLE: A person commits private nuisance by unreasonably interfering with another’s use or enjoyment of their land. Whether interference is unreasonable depends on its duration, timing and intensity, and on the character of the locality. Interference that is trivial, or normal for the area, is not actionable.

FACTS: Aarav opens a small carpentry workshop in a street of workshops and light factories. He runs machinery from 10 am to 5 pm on weekdays, within permitted hours. His neighbour, who works night shifts and sleeps during the day, says the noise makes daytime sleep impossible.

Is Aarav liable in nuisance?

PRINCIPLE: A person defames another by publishing to a third party a statement that lowers the other in the estimation of right-thinking members of society. It is a complete defence that the statement is substantially true. The defence is not defeated merely because the publisher acted from ill will.

FACTS: A former employee posts publicly that a restaurant owner was convicted of adulterating food in 2019. The conviction is a matter of public record and did occur. The employee admits she posted it purely to damage the owner’s business.

Can the owner succeed in defamation?

PRINCIPLE: A person who brings onto their land something likely to cause harm if it escapes, and keeps it there as part of a non-natural use of the land, is liable for the damage its escape causes, even without carelessness. There is no liability where the escape is caused wholly by an act of a stranger over whom the occupier has no control.

FACTS: A factory stores industrial dye in a large tank. A trespasser cuts the tank open at night, dye floods a neighbouring farm and ruins the crop. The factory had maintained the tank properly.

Is the factory liable?

PRINCIPLE: A person who freely and knowingly accepts the risk of a particular harm cannot later complain of that harm. Acceptance must be of the specific risk that materialised, and must be genuinely voluntary. Knowledge of a risk alone is not acceptance of it.

FACTS: Ishita buys a ticket for a cricket match and sits in an unnetted stand, knowing balls are sometimes hit into the crowd. During the match a section of the stand’s railing, corroded and unmaintained, gives way and she falls and is injured.

Can the stadium rely on her acceptance of risk?

PRINCIPLE: A proposal is a statement made with the intention of being bound as soon as the other party accepts it. A statement inviting others to make proposals is not itself a proposal and cannot be accepted into a contract. Displaying goods with a price is ordinarily an invitation to others to make proposals.

FACTS: A bookshop displays a rare edition in its window marked Rs 8,000. Tanvi walks in, puts Rs 8,000 on the counter and says she accepts. The shopkeeper says the book is already reserved and refuses to sell.

Is there a contract?

PRINCIPLE: A consumer is a person who buys goods or hires services for consideration, but not one who obtains them for resale or for any commercial purpose. Deficiency means any shortcoming in the quality or manner of performance of a service that is required to be maintained under a law or under a contract.

FACTS: Faizan buys twelve identical industrial sewing machines for the garment workshop he runs for profit. Four arrive faulty and the supplier refuses to repair them. He seeks relief as a consumer.

Can he?