How to Use These Notes and What the Exam Looks Like

The question formats that appear repeatedly in Law Paper 2 are:

• Direct memory questions: who wrote which book, who propounded which theory, which case laid down which principle, which Article says what.

• Statement-based questions: two or more statements are given and you must choose the correct combination (Statement I true and II false, and so on). These test whether you know the nuance, not just the name.

• Match the list (List I with List II): jurist with theory, jurist with book, case with principle, concept with definition. This is the single most common format in Jurisprudence.

• Assertion and Reason: you must decide whether the reason correctly explains the assertion.

• Chronological or sequence questions: for example, arranging schools or thinkers in order of appearance.

• 'Which is NOT correct' questions: these reward careful reading of exceptions and common mix-ups, such as confusing Austin with Bentham or Hart with Kelsen.

• Questions are increasingly applied: the examiner gives a situation or a proposition and asks which jurist or school it matches, instead of asking only for names.

• Indian Supreme Court and High Court judgments on legal personality (rivers, animals, idols, religious books), privacy, constitutional morality and liability appear far more often than they used to.

• Modern and contemporary thinkers (Rawls, Dworkin, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Pogge, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard) now get regular representation, alongside the classical names (Austin, Salmond, Savigny, Pound).

• Topics 8, 9 and 10 (Law, poverty and development; Global justice; Modernism and post-modernism) are comparatively newer in the syllabus and are very predictable: a handful of thinkers and books decide almost every question.

• The Hart–Devlin, Hart–Fuller and Hart–Dworkin debates, the distinction between 'is' and 'ought', and the contrast between 'rights' (Hohfeld, Salmond) and 'duties' keep recurring.

build a two-column memory sheet for every school (thinker, book, core idea, one-line criticism), memorise the 15 to 20 cases flagged as high-yield in each topic, and revise the 'common confusions' boxes at the end of each topic the day before the exam.