Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Medium

PT107 S2 P4 Q25 Explanation

Medieval English Law and Women

A free, expert breakdown of this official LSAT Reading Comprehension question.

TopicsLocate DetailLaw

Keep going in LSAT Lab

  • Save & drill this skill — build targeted practice sets from questions like this one

  • Video walkthroughs — watch every question solved step by step

  • 81 official LSATs — as questions, timed sections & full-length tests

Start practicing free

Free to start

Full official LSAT questions are available through LawHub. This page provides LSAT Lab's explanation, strategy, and review tools without republishing the full official question.

Passage

Until about 1970, anyone who wanted to write a comprehensive history of medieval English law as it actually affected women would have found a dearth of published books or articles concerned with specific legal topics relating to women and derived from extensive research in actual court records. This is a serious deficiency, guess at the answers to these questions, and this scholarly work has been attempted by few.

One can easily imagine why. Most medieval English court records are written in Latin or Anglo-Norman French and have never been published. The sheer volume of material to be sifted is daunting: there are over 27,500 parchment pages in the common plea rolls of the thirteenth century alone, every page nearly three law and the medieval Englishwoman is still fragmentary at best, though the situation is slowly improving.

What this question is testing

Locate Detail

Your task

Pin down exactly what the question asks about the passage — a detail, the author's view, the structure, or the main point — before looking at the choices.

Common trap

Answers that restate a true detail from the passage but don't answer the specific question being asked.

Winning move

Anticipate the answer in your own words from the passage, then find the choice that matches that prediction.

Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.

The question
25.

According to the passage, the sources consulted by legal scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided adequate information concerning which one

Answer choices

  1. Correct73% picked this

    the intent of medieval English laws regarding women and the opinions of commentators concerning how

    Why this is right

    This looks like a strong match for those "latter questions that can be answered". We wanted "how the law was intended to affect them or thought to affect them" . This answer encompasses both, speaking about the intent of the law and the opinions of commentators about how they thought the law affected women.

    Skill tested: Locate Detail · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.

  2. Unrelated to Goal14% picked this

    the overall effectiveness of English law in the medieval period and some aspects of the special statutes that

    We wanted "how the law was intended to affect women or thought to affect women" . This answer talks about the overall effectiveness of English law in the medieval period, which definitely doesn't match our target.

  3. Too Specific: probability of winning3% picked this

    the degree of probability that a women defendant or plaintiff would win a legal case

    We wanted "how the law was intended to affect women or thought to affect women" . This is in the same realm, but if scholars were answering the question about what probability females had of winning in court, that would probably fall more into the category of "how the law actually affected women", which our author says these sources are of little help in determining.

  4. Unrelated to Goal1% picked this

    the degree to which the male relatives of medieval Englishwomen could succeed in preventing those women from

    We wanted "how the law was intended to affect women or thought to affect women" . This answer talks about the male relatives of medieval Englishwomen, which definitely doesn't match our target.

  5. Opposite: in practice9% picked this

    which of the legal rights theoretically shared by men and women were, in practice, guaranteed

    We wanted "how the law was intended to affect women or thought to affect women" . The sources studied by these scholars are of little help in determining how the law actually affected women. This answer is saying, "forget about what legal rights are theoretically intended to be guaranteed to men. In actual practice, what legal rights were only guaranteed to men?" So this is speaking to the blind spot of what these sources are of little help in determining.

Continue the review in LSAT Lab

Save this question, watch the video walkthrough, and drill similar questions in your LSAT Lab account.

Save and practice this skill
LSAT Lab

Turn this review into a targeted study plan.

Save this question, drill more like it, watch the video walkthrough, and track your progress in your LSAT Lab account.

Start practicing free