Legal theorist: It is unreasonable

A free, expert breakdown of this official LSAT Logical Reasoning question.

TopicsRole

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Stimulus

Legal theorist: It is unreasonable to incarcerate anyone for any other reason than that he or she is a serious threat to the property or lives of other people. The breaking of a law does not justify incarceration, for lawbreaking proceeds either from ignorance of the law or of the effects of agent are products of genetics and environmental conditioning, neither of which is controlled by the agent.

What this question is testing

Role

Conclusion

Look at the structure. The legal theorist starts by stating a position: incarceration is only reasonable for protecting people from serious threats. Then everything after that ("for ..." then "Obviously ..." then "and even ...") is the case for that opening claim.

Evidence

The supporting case works by elimination: lawbreaking comes from ignorance or free choice; ignorance can't justify incarceration; free choice can't either (because choices come from desires, which come from genetics + environment, which the agent didn't choose). With both alternatives ruled out, the only legitimate ground left is protection from threat — the opening claim.

Evaluate

So the first sentence isn't background or a setup — it's the destination. The rest of the passage is the journey to it.

Goal

The right answer says the first sentence is the main conclusion.

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

The question

The claim in the first sentence of the passage plays which one of the following roles

Answer choices

Wrong Role3% picked this
It is offered as a premise that helps to show that no actions are under the
This says the first sentence is offered as a premise for a different conclusion (that no actions are under the agent's control). That gets the structure backward — the claim about agent control appears later in the passage as a sub-step supporting the first sentence, not the other way around. The first sentence is what everything else is in service of.
3%
Wrong Role4% picked this
It is offered as background information necessary to understand
The first sentence isn't background; it's the active claim the passage is arguing for. Background information sets context without being the point — but here the point is exactly the first sentence, and everything else builds toward it.
4%
Correct91% picked this
It is offered as the main conclusion that the argument is
Why this is right
This identifies the first sentence as the main conclusion. The passage opens with the claim and then spends the rest of its space defending it: lawbreaking comes from ignorance or free choice, ignorance doesn't justify incarceration, and free choice doesn't either — leaving "threat to others" as the only legitimate ground. The first sentence is what the argument is designed to establish.
Skill tested: Role · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.
91%
Wrong Role1% picked this
It is offered as evidence for the stated claim that protection of life and property is more important than
The passage doesn't contain any claim about protection of life and property being more important than retribution for past illegal acts. There's no such "stated claim" for the first sentence to be evidence for. The structure described here doesn't exist in the passage.
1%
Wrong Role2% picked this
It is offered as evidence for the stated claim that lawbreaking proceeds from either ignorance of the law, or ignorance of the effects
The disjunctive claim about lawbreaking proceeding from ignorance or free choice is offered as a premise (it sets up the elimination-of-alternatives reasoning). It's not a conclusion that the first sentence is evidence for. In fact, the first sentence is what the disjunctive claim helps to support, not the other way around.
2%

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