Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Medium

PT108 S1 P2 Q15 Explanation

Non-Objectivist Discourse

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TopicsInferenceLaw

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Passage

In recent years, a growing belief that the way society decides what to treat as true is controlled through largely unrecognized discursive practices has led legal reformers to examine the complex interconnections between narrative and law. In many legal systems, legal judgments are based on competing stories about events. Without having witnessed in law from selective perception, or from subjective judgments based on prior experiences, values, and beliefs.

The societal harm caused by the assumption of objectivist principles in traditional legal discourse is that, historically, the stories judged to be objectively true are those told by people who are trained in legal discourse, while the stories of language of the law are rejected as false.

Legal scholars such as Patricia Williams, Derrick Bell, and Mari Matsuda have sought empowerment for the latter group of people through the construction of alternative legal narratives. Objectivist legal discourse systematically disallows the language of emotion and experience by focusing on cognition in its narrowest sense. These legal reformers propose replacing such by overcoming differences in background and training and forming a new collectivity based on emotional empathy.

What this question is testing

Inference

Your task

Find what must be true based on what the passage or stimulus states.

Common trap

Answers that are plausible or likely but not actually guaranteed by the text.

Winning move

Keep only the choice the statements fully support — eliminate anything that requires an extra assumption.

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

The question
15.

Which one of the following statements about legal discourse in legal systems based on objectivism can be inferred

Answer choices

  1. Too Strong8% picked this

    In most Western societies’ the legal establishment controls access to training

    Too Strong: most Out of Scope: controls access There is a line in the 1st paragraph about "most Western legal and intellectual systems", but it just says that most Western societies have had legal systems rooted in objectivism. The passage never discusses who controls access to training in this discourse. We certainly get the impression that people in the legal profession are better at it than your average person, but we don't have any information about any entity controlling access to training. If a non-lawyer wanted training in legal discourse without going into the legal establishment, that seems totally possible. The passage says nothing to rule that out.

  2. Correct76% picked this

    Expertise in legal discourse affords power in most

    Why this is right

    We are told in the middle of the 1st paragraph that most Western societies have legal systems rooted in objectivism. The beginning of the 2nd paragraph says that "the harm caused by the assumption of objectivist principles in traditional legal discourse is that the stories judged to be objectively true are those told by people who are trained in legal discourse". And the first paragraph told us that whomever the judge/jury believe is telling the truth is going to win the case. The beginning of the 3rd paragraph is where we hear about power: Legal scholars ... have sought empowerment for the latter group of people (those not fluent in the language of the law) through the construction of alternative legal narratives. The implication is that expertise in legal discourse is empowering -- juries / judges are more likely to recognize your story as the "true" one. If we're seeking empowerment for people who aren't fluent in the language of the law, (who don't have expertise in legal discourse), then that suggests that they don't currently have power. And if we're seeking empowerment through the construction of alternative legal narratives, that suggests that one's expertise in a legal narrative is a gateway to power. So we need to cobble a few things together to support this, but it also resonates with the overall main point that we're realizing that in our current system, we're exacerbating power inequalities by rewarding people who have the money / expertise / training needed to play the game of speaking via objectivist legal discourse. Meanwhile, the author and others are trying to ameliorate this by normalizing narratives. The best individual supporting line for this answer is the 3rd to last sentence of the passage: The compelling force of personal narrative can create a sense of empathy between legal insiders and people traditionally excluded from legal discourse, and, hence, from power.

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

  3. Unsupported Comparison: more abstract4% picked this

    Legal discourse has become progressively more abstract for

    This is a classic Relative vs. Absolute trap answers. In the final paragraph, the current objectivist legal discourse is labeled abstract (in an absolute sense). This answer then tries to bait us into making that a Relative comparison, as it invents this storyline where legal discourse is getting more abstract over time.

  4. Opposite7% picked this

    Legal discourse has traditionally denied the existence of neutral,

    Legal discourse traditionally operates on objectivist principles which assume there is such a thing as a neutral, objective observer. The author says in the 1st paragraph that the serious flaw in objectivism is that there is no such thing as a the neutral, objective observer, implying that objectivism assumes there is such a thing.

  5. Opposite, if anything6% picked this

    Traditional legal discourse seeks to reconcile dissonant

    Traditional legal discourse is steeped in objectivism, which believes that "there is a single neutral description of each event that is unskewed by any particular point of view and that has a privileged position over all other accounts. The law's quest for truth consists of locating this objective description." In other words, it's not trying to validate and reconcile dissonant world views. It's seeking out the one, true, neutral description of reality. This answer is teasing some language from the last sentence of the passage, in which the author is saying "a departure from traditional legal discourse and a normalization of personal narrative could play a positive role in overcoming differences in background (reconciling dissonant world views)."

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