Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Easy

PT151 S1 P1 Q1 ExplanationThe Shelley Court

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

TopicsPrimary PurposeLaw

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Passage

The United States Supreme Court’s 1948 ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer famously disallowed state courts from enforcing racially restrictive covenants. Such covenants are, in essence, private legal obligations included in the deed to a property requiring that only members of a certain race be allowed to occupy the property. Because it prohibited are unjust, the stated legal rationale for the Shelley decision has nevertheless proven to be problematic.

The Shelley Court relied on the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which grants equal protection under the law to all U.S. citizens. This amendment had long been held to apply to state actors but not individuals. Shelley did not purport to alter this. But where, then, was the state action that property, it followed from Shelley’s analysis that judicial enforcement of racially restrictive covenants also was unconstitutional.

Shelley’s attribution logic threatened to dissolve the distinction between state action, to which Fourteenth Amendment limitations apply, and private action, which falls outside of the Fourteenth Amendment’s purview. After all, Shelley’s approach, consistently applied, would require individuals to conform their private agreements to constitutional standards whenever, as is almost always the case, fact that statutory limitations on the identical speech would represent an unconstitutional violation of free speech.

Additionally, there is a particularly noxious aspect of the Shelley Court’s analytics—namely, the Court’s conclusion that racially restrictive covenants themselves were perfectly legal. The legal rationale behind the Shelley decision thus failed to target the genuine problem with racially the covenants’ enforcement but their substantive content.

What this question is testing

Primary Purpose

Anticipate

This is a Primary Purpose question, so step back and ask: across the whole passage, what is the author doing?

The author opens by saying the outcome of Shelley v. Kraemer was rightly celebrated — but immediately pivots to: the legal reasoning is problematic. The next three paragraphs are all in service of that critique. Paragraph 2 explains how the Court reasoned. Paragraph 3 shows the reasoning would erase the line between state and private action, and that courts since haven't actually followed it. Paragraph 4 names the deepest issue: the rationale leaves the covenants themselves legal, which misses the real problem.

Goal

Looking for an answer that names this as questioning a particular ruling's reasoning, at the level of the whole passage. Common traps to watch for:

Answers that defend or extend the rationale — the author is doing the opposite

Answers that grab onto a single sub-topic from one paragraph (the state/private distinction) instead of the overall purpose

Answers that target the Constitution itself rather than the Court's reasoning

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 primary purpose of the passage

Answer choices, explained

Correct91% picked this
question the reasoning behind a particular
Why this is right
This is supported across all four paragraphs. The author flags in P1 that the rationale is "problematic," uses P3 to show that consistently applying it would collapse the state/private distinction (and that later courts haven't followed it), and culminates in P4 by calling the rationale's implication — that the covenants themselves were "perfectly legal" — "noxious." The whole passage is one sustained question of the reasoning behind Shelley.
Skill tested: Primary Purpose · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.
91%
Too Narrow2% picked this
draw a distinction between private action and
The state-action vs. private-action distinction does come up — most prominently in P3, where the author says the attribution rationale would "dissolve" it. But drawing that distinction is not the author's overall purpose; it's a step inside the larger critique of the rationale. (B) mistakes one supporting move for the whole project. And drawing a distinction is a different kind of move from the author's actual move, which is critical: showing the rationale would erase a distinction the law depends on.
2%
Opposite2% picked this
defend the way in which scholars and courts have traditionally explained a
The author is critical of the Shelley rationale, not defending it. P1 calls the rationale "problematic," P3 says later courts haven't adopted it, and P4 calls part of it "noxious." (C) describes the exact opposite stance.
2%
Wrong Purpose3% picked this
highlight the shortcomings of the U.S.
The author critiques the Court's reasoning, not the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment is treated as the legal background the Court was applying — the author never argues that the Constitution itself is shortcoming-ridden. The complaint is about how the Court applied it. The passage doesn't identify any defects in the Constitution at all — only in Shelley's use of it.
3%
Opposite2% picked this
extend the rationale offered in a particular judicial decision to
P3 explicitly observes that "neither the Supreme Court nor lower courts later applied Shelley's approach" and that doing so would collapse the state/private distinction. The author is using that fact against the rationale, not extending the rationale to new cases. (E) describes the opposite of what the author does.
2%

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