Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Easy

PT18 S3 P1 Q1 Explanation

Law and Literature Movement

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

TopicsPrimary PurposeLaw

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Passage

The law-and-literature movement claims to have introduced a valuable pedagogical innovation into legal study: instructing students in techniques of literary analysis for the purpose of interpreting laws and in the reciprocal use of legal analysis for the purpose of interpreting literary texts. The results, according to advocates, are not only conceptual breakthroughs in which he systematically refutes the writings of its leading legal scholars and cooperating literary critics.

Critiquing the movement’s assumption that lawyers can offer special insights into literature that deals with legal matters, Posner points out that writers of literature use the law loosely to convey a particular idea, or as a metaphor for the workings of the society envisioned in their fiction. Legal questions per se, about himself vulnerable to Posner’s devastating remark that “any argument can be analogized to a legal dispute.’’

Similarly, the notion that literary criticism can be helpful in interpreting law is problematic. Posner argues that literary criticism in general aims at exploring richness and variety of meaning in texts, whereas legal interpretation aims at discovering a single meaning. A literary approach can thus only confuse the task of like deconstruction, which holds that all texts are inherently uninterpretable.

Nevertheless, Posner writes that law-and-literature is a field with “promise.” Why? Perhaps, recognizing the success of a movement that, in the past, has singled him out for abuse, he is attempting to appease his detractors, paying obeisance to the movement’s institutional success declaring that it “deserves a place in legal research” while law-and-literature and as a tribute to the power it has come to exercise in academic circles.

What this question is testing

Primary Purpose

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
1.

The primary purpose of the passage

Answer choices

  1. Correct89% picked this

    assess the law-and-literature movement by examining the position of one of its

    Why this is right

    The author did indeed assess the movement (an entirely factitious undertaking deserving of no intellectual respect whatsoever) and spends the bulk of the passage doing so by examining Posner's thoughts on the matter. Verbs like "evaluate / assess" are often used when LSAT is trying to be less obvious about "challenge a position / tell someone they're wrong / critique something". An evaluation / assessment is always an opinionated purpose, and if the author's main point was "this thing sucks", then their purpose can be said to have been to evaluate / assess something.

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

  2. Opposite, if anything3% picked this

    assert that a mutually beneficial relationship exists between the study of law and the

    Was this passage's main point that "there's a benefit to lawyers studying literature and to literature majors studying the law"? No, if anything, it's the opposite. It's more like, "Check out this dumb legal movement that tries to get lawyers to study literature".

  3. Out of Scope: examples2% picked this

    provide examples of the law-and-literature movement in practice by discussing the work

    If the primary purpose were to present examples of the law-and-literature, we'd be able to name at least 2 or 3 specific pieces of literature that lawyers read, or 2 or 3 specific literary techniques that can be applied to the law. We don't have any such examples. Furthermore, the verb "provide examples" is too presentational / too neutral to fit this passage, which had a Challenge Position opinionated point of view. When you merely present examples of X, you're suggesting you implicitly support X (you're certainly not conveying that you actively oppose X).

  4. Opposite4% picked this

    dismiss a prominent critic’s recent study of the

    The author is embracing Posner's (the prominent critic's) recent study, not dismissing it. The author's only chagrin with Posner is that Posner started to soften his critical stance on the movement under pressure of its popularity. But the study stands on its own as a rebuttal of the movement, and the author agrees with rebutting this inane movement.

  5. Wrong Emphasis1% picked this

    describe the role played by literary scholars in providing a broader context

    The central topic of this passage was the Law and Literature movement, yet this answer choice doesn't refer to it at all.

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