Q8

[cyruswhittaker]

Can you help me answer question 8? Thanks

[aileenann]

Inference questions are often among the hardest on the RC because it's unclear what our task is. Sometimes, we merely need to identify relevant text and looks for an answer choice that rewrites the text without changing the meaning. Other times we need to suss out multiple bits of the text and put them together before we can get an idea of what should be properly inferred.

Here, we need to know how the history of law relates to modern jurisprudence, so we should skim the passage and our notes to see where we get this information in the test.

If we look in particular at the 2nd paragraph of the passage, we have lots of clues as to what the author thinks. In particular, he seems to indicate the modern jurisprudence takes too simplistic a view of the history of law and uses it in fairly convenient ways. we get a clue that the author doesn't think this is such a good thing through word choice like "ignore" and "partly political." So we are looking for a negative take on modern jurisprudence's take on history.

Let's take a look at the answer choices.

(A) looks alright, so let's keep it. It has a slightly negative bent and implies that the history isn't being taken at its fullest.

(B) is going too far - the author never said the old forms were antiquated and irrelevant.

(C) is the opposite of what the author says. He says that this system of rules approach may not be the best or most accurate way to think about the history of law.

(D) is also the opposite of what the author says. His view is the opposite - that we may be trying things up in a neat package when we really shouldn't.

(E) is completely out of scope - we don't have anything in this section about dispiriting students!

I hope this helps you see why (A) is the answer, and also how to best approach these inference questions. Please let me know if any of this doesn't make sense or if you have any more questions.

Happy studying!

[cyruswhittaker]

Thank you that helps to clear it up for me.

However, with E, the author mentions "dispiriting" in line 38, but from what I gather it is in reference to the beliefs that the students/public want to have, which is one reason why modern jurisprudence is expressed the way it is.

So for E, the author is actually saying the opposite: the mainstream theories help to NOT make it dispiriting to students/public.

Is this correct?

Thanks again for your help. Sometimes I just have a difficult time figuring out what the author is even saying!

[aileenann]

Thanks for the follow-up Cyrus!

Two things. First, I don't think that "dispiriting" gets us anywhere because it's a counter-factual - that's where the author talks about what *would* happen.

But you are right about the way he's using the counterfactual. He's saying that if they did otherwise, it would be dispiriting for the students - not that it's currently dispiriting. So *yes* you are absolutely correct about another way of eliminating (E).

Good luck studying! Let us know if you have more questions.

[alinanny]

Thank you for actally clarifying the whole second paragraph. Sometimes is hard to keep track of what the author actually agrees with and what is he critizicing. That certainly makes him a good writer but with no more than 4 minutes to understand and digest all of this is hard to not get caught up in details.
My question is what is the nature of legal tradition? Is it the view that laws come from other laws in a sort of historical chain that the author does not think is as linear as moder jurisprudence makes it seem?
If A says that modern jurisprudence MISINTERPRET the nature of legal tradition does that mean that MJ misinterpret/ignores/ ommits the value of this historical laws and picks and chose which laws are relevant or make sense to the coherence of the legal time line?
It is not clear to me what the legal tradition is to the passage is general. It is related to the history of the law. The author's view conflicting with that of moder jurisprudence but I am a little lost still.
Anthing would help!
Thanks

[giladedelman]

I think the author's view is best summed up here: "common law cannot properly be understood without taking a long historical view." So you have to understand the history behind the law to really understand the law.

But modern jurisprudence misinterprets the legal tradition by overlooking the historical aspect. We're told that "modern jurisprudence has consistently treated law as a unified system of
rules that can be studied at any given moment in time
as a logical whole. The notion of jurisprudence as a
system of norms or principles deemphasizes history
in favor of the coherence of a system."

That's really the key. The author believes that the legal tradition is all about history, whereas modern jurisprudence ignores that to some extent.

Does that answer your question?

[alinanny]

I think the author's view is best summed up here: "common law cannot properly be understood without taking a long historical view." So you have to understand the history behind the law to really understand the law.

But modern jurisprudence misinterprets the legal tradition by overlooking the historical aspect. We're told that "modern jurisprudence has consistently treated law as a unified system of
rules that can be studied at any given moment in time
as a logical whole. The notion of jurisprudence as a
system of norms or principles deemphasizes history
in favor of the coherence of a system."

That's really the key. The author believes that the legal tradition is all about history, whereas modern jurisprudence ignores that to some extent.

Does that answer your question?

Yes, it does. Thank you

[skapur777]

What exactly does 'misinterpret' mean then?

For it to misinterpret it, doesn't that mean that they studied it and then came to suspect conclusiosn about it? It seems instead that jurisprudence just straight up ignores it. Does ignoring something = misinterpreting it?

My second question is, what does 'legal tradition' mean? I eliminated it because legal tradition wasn't really mentioned too much except for line 7 (I think) but I didn't know what 'legal tradition' meant and if it was fair to include an examination of history within such a category.

[giladedelman]

You're right that "misinterpret" and "ignore" are not the same. But we're not saying that modern jurisprudence misinterprets common law. We're saying it ignores common law, which leads it to misinterpret the legal tradition as a whole.

It's as if you wrote a book about the history of the LSAT, but you ignored the importance of logical reasoning. I would argue that you're misinterpreting the LSAT tradition.

As for "legal tradition": yeah, it's basically the same as legal history.

[shirleyx]

my take on this question.
I wrongly chose (D), but was stuck between (A) and (D)....

my review:..

(B) is wrong because this isn't something the author would believe. The author believes the exact opposite. "common law cannot be properly understood without taking a long historical view"
(C) is wrong for the same reason as (B), the author supports the guy in the last Paragraph, and that guy states the opposite of this. " common law is most fruitfully studied as a continually developing tradition rather than as a set of rules"
(E) is wrong because this choice is unsupported. We don't know about these people's feeling towards legal history.
(D) is wrong because "order and coherence of legal history" is not mentioned anywhere. Many many assumptions are needed to be made in order to support this answer.
This leaves us with (A). This is correct because the other 4 are wrong, but also because "misinterprets" is a correct term here that can be described author's attitude towards the "academic" studies of jurisprudence. Refer to the first sentence of second paragraph.

please correct/add to discussion

[Mab6q]

Guys, I really am having a hard time eliminating E here. I get where you find support for A, but explain E to me. Maybe I'm understanding the second paragraph incorrectly. Is the last sentence the author's response to those that view common law in political terms, or is the author continuing discussion of what those who aspire to that view hold?

[MeganL677]

Not a geek but try to answer...

For E) to be eliminated I think there are a few reasons (not sure if all of them work...)

First, I think the modern jurisprudence do have "a sense of legal history", as indicated in L19, they "do acknowledge the antiquity of common law". But just their "sense of legal history" is not evolving.

Second, The emphasize of E misses the point of the question stem. E) focuses on the modern jurisprudence's influence on the students and the public, while the question asked about "the history of law in relation to modern jurisprudence".

Last, even if mentioning dispiriting to students is ever relevant, it's not modern jurisprudence's theories that have the dispiriting effect, but "not to treat tradition as if it were ...the application of known rules to objectively determined facts" does.

Someone's insight, please?

[YufeiR103]

For D, there is an explicit sentence providing the answer in paragraph 2, "the notion of jurisprudence as a system of norms or principles deemphasized history in favor of the coherence of a system".

That is, the current theory sacrifices the history to get the coherence, so D is actually a 180.