#8 - Concept Reference, Must Be True, Author's Perspective

[jwheeler]

(sorry, I'm not actually sure how to classify this question)

This passage was brutal for me... I was confused during a lot of it.

Can someone explain #8 for me? I see that modern jurisprudence is discussed in paragraph 2, but I couldn't pick out a sentence that claimed it misinterpreted the nature of the legal tradition. I chose C instead.

[Adam Tyson]

Happy to help, jwheeler! This was a tough passage for many of my students, so you're not alone there. I think the key is to first recognize that our author appears to give favorable treatment to Peter Goodrich's view of the law. We get the first hints that the author doesn't completely agree with the view of modern jurisprudence in that second paragraph. The author just told us that to understand common law we must take a long historical view, and then he tells us that the modern approach seldom does that, favoring instead a view of the law as a fixed set of rules. Then, in the discussion of the political terms of the modern approach, he tells us that the system is being treated as fair, "even if history shows the legal tradition to be far from unitary and seldom logical." That "even if" language should tell us that the author thinks the modern approach is incorrect.

I think the final bit of evidence is the use of "however" in discussing Goodrich's view. That word indicates a different, even contrary, opinion, and at that point we should be confident that our author thinks Goodrich is correct and the view of modern jurisprudence is mistaken. It's not just one sentence or phrase that tells us this, but the cumulative effect of the tone, the main point, and those linguistic indications of disagreement and disapproval.

Answer C runs contrary to those indicators. Our author doesn't think common law should be viewed as a fixed set of rules, but as an evolving one that should be continuously rewritten to adapt to changing circumstances. That's the "literary text" approach suggested by Goodrich.

Try reading for indications of tone, and see if that helps you more with these "author agreement" questions. The author will agree with his tone and his main point, and not with things that go against them! Good luck, and enjoy more challenging reading comp as much as you can!

[CRWalk]

What makes D an incorrect answer?

[Brook Miscoski]

CRWalk,

Lines 30-39 indicate that legal history may be incoherent and illogical, which directly contradicts answer choice (D). Thus, (D) cannot be the correct choice.

[na02]

I'm not sure how B is wrong, but I'll do my best to try to explain what got me toward B and not A:

B: I thought the passage talked about common law in general, and that it's not "appropriately analyzed" (for lack of a better word) by modern jurisprudence - that is, modern jurisprudence acknowledges common law's tradition, but not the practical aspects & how it can be applied to modern times. So I thought over the course of examining the history of law, common law is just an old (antiquated) and irrelevant (not applicable) to modern jurisprudence.

As for A: I thought misinterprets is a pretty strong word, so I had crossed it out

Any help in understanding this Q would help in further understanding! (major tautology )
Thank you!

[Adam Tyson]

Answer B has some very strong language, na02, and it would be very difficult to support such a strong statement, especially when the author and Goodrich view common law as an essential but evolving aspect of legal history and study. Does anything in this passage "prove" anything about common law? And if it does, does it prove that common law is "antiquated and irrelevant"? Look, for example to these lines at the end of the first paragraph:

Connected not only with legal history but also with the cultural history of the English people, common law cannot properly be understood without taking a long historical view.

These words, among others, suggest that common law is not viewed either by legal history or by modern legal scholars as antiquated or irrelevant. Modern jurisprudence treats it as a fixed aspect of a coherent set of rules, while historians like Goodrich see it as an ever-evolving tradition, so nobody here is treating it as irrelevant.

Beware strong language, and only select those answers that you can completely support based on the text! Answer B is too extreme and lacks support, while answer A is much softer and easier to defend.

[Desperatenconfused]

Wouldn’t C technically be correct because it states that history of law, if applicable to modern jurisprudence, is best studied as a system of rules? Like if the history of law is studied in the lens of modern jurisprudence, “the notion of jurisprudence as a system of norms or principles deemphasizes history in favor of the coherence of a system.”

[Robert Carroll]

Desperatenconfused,

The normative language in answer choice (C) just doesn't make sense. The author thinks that modern jurisprudence gets the history of law wrong. The "best" way to study the history of law is then not to adopt the procedure of modern jurisprudence at all. The clause in answer choice (C) that is set off in commas isn't saying anything like "according to modern jurisprudence". It says "if {the history of law} is to be made applicable to modern jurisprudence." So the history of law is being applied to modern jurisprudence, not vice versa. This means that we're looking for what the best way to apply the history of law is...and the end of the answer says something contrary to the author's view. This is just a non-starter answer.

Robert Carroll