#24 - The role of the Uplandian supreme court is to protect

[allisonellen7]

I don't understand how to come to the conclusion it is equally possible for a different premise to be false. Thanks!

[Robert Carroll]

Allison,

The argument is correct when it claims that some of the premises contradict each other. When premises contradict each other, at least some of them have to be rejected. The flaw in the argument was rejecting one premise rather than any of the others. Instead of rejecting the premise that the role of the court was to protect against abuses of human rights, the author could have rejected the following premise: "human rights will be subject to the whim of whoever holds judicial power unless the supreme court is bound to adhere to a single objective standard, namely, the constitution." As the argument concludes in a contradiction, and no premise is more strongly supported than any other, there's no prior reason to keep one premise over another. So if we have to reject a premise, we could reject this later one just as easily as the first sentence. So the author was engaging in flawed reasoning by concluding that we HAVE to do without the first premise.

Robert Carroll

[allisonellen7]

Thank you so much for your response!

[jlam061695]

I chose E (which is the correct answer), but I don't know if my reasoning is correct? Is the "particular premise [that] is false" referring to the claim that "the role of the Uplandian supreme court is to protect all human rights against abuses of government power"? I interpreted E to mean that the role of Uplandian supreme court can be both to protect human rights through both the explicit provisions of the constitution and principles not stated in the constitution. I don't think I understand the second portion of E, though. Which part of the stimulus has a premise that could be false?

[Adam Tyson]

Thanks for the question about this rather unusual stimulus and stem, jlam!

Your analysis of the first part of answer E is correct, and matches what the stem asked about. The premise that the author concluded was false was the first sentence about the role of the court.

The second premise that answer E refers to is this one:

human rights will be subject to the whim of whoever holds judicial power unless the supreme court is bound to adhere to a single objective standard, namely, the constitution

That was what our author relied on to come to the conclusion that the court must rely solely on the explicit terms of the constitution and nothing else. In other words, he came up with two incompatible conclusions (rely on outside info vs not do that), and determined that the first one must be wrong. But couldn't it be that the second one is the wrong one? That's the flaw here - selecting one choice over another without any justification for the preference.

We've seen plenty of "false dilemma" problems on the LSAT before and since, but this one was stranger than most, especially due to its long, drawn out structure.

I hope that clears it up some!

[jlam061695]

Thanks for the clarification! I definitely did not think of this as a false dilemma until you pointed it out! i was only able to choose the correct answer because the other four choices were largely irrelevant to the stimulus.

[adlindsey]

I don't know why E is right. I also couldn't decipher the meaning of this long winded bad writing stimulus. I also thought I am supposed to take--in these questions types--what's in the stimulus as true. So I don't know how E is right.

[Dave Killoran]

Hi A,

There's no doubt that they aren't always clear when they are writing, but that's actually built into the test as part of the difficulty (just as some legal contracts I've seen are ridiculously convoluted). We know we're going to see stimuli like this (which is more intentionally convoluted than badly written), so there's nothing to be gained from complaining about their writing. Instead, the challenge is to parse what they have said and properly interpret it. That's probably where you ran into problems on this one, because if you didn't feel like you fully grasped what was being said, then answering questions based on that information will be challenging.

Remember that in Flaw questions you are tasked with identifying what the author did improperly. That means you identify what the author did and use that to prove an answer. So, nothing is inconsistent here.

Last note: this is question #24 in the section, which, as we know from general section trends, means that there's a reasonable possibility this could be a rather difficult question. And indeed, in this case that proves to be true. Overall, I'd say this is a very high difficulty questions, starting with the difficult-to-understand stimulus all the way through the tricky answer.

Thanks!

[LSAT2018]

If a False Dilemma assumes that only two courses of action are available when there may be others, may I ask how this definition fits in with the error of reasoning here?


Thanks in advance!

[Adam Tyson]

The dilemma presented is this: either the court sticks strictly to the letter of the constitution, and therefore does not protect all human rights but only those that are explicit in that document, or else the court looks to principles beyond the constitution, in which case they may be covering more rights but then become subject to the whims of whoever is on that court and thus will not protect all such rights.

The author leaves out at least one other possibility, and that is that the courts could look beyond the constitution and still cover all human rights, because that is what their whims lead them to do.

Now this could also be looked at through another lens, that of a more general evidence flaw of a type we see fairly often. Here, the evidence is that the court cannot always accomplish a certain goal, and the conclusion is that they must not intend to accomplish that goal. We often see arguments where intentions, or motives, and results get mixed up. For example, we might see an argument that a certain tax policy had a certain effect, with the conclusion that the effect must have been intended. This overlooks the possibility that the effect was unintended. In this case, it may be true that the court cannot protect all human rights from government abuses, but it could still be their job to try to do so. In other words, failing doesn't mean they didn't do their best.

Many Flaw questions can be looked at in several different ways, and described using different language. That's why we discourage our students from focusing on memorizing the names of the different flaws and getting caught up in trying to label them. The answers won't be about the labels, but about understanding what those labels mean, what the underlying flaw is rather than what we call it. Use the labels as a helpful shortcut, because it makes them easier to talk about and grasp, but don't allow the labels to get in the way of actual understanding.

Good luck!