#15 - Must Be True, Except

[hadimadi]

Hi Robert,

thanks for your reply, but I don't see how this is different from my answer?

Could you please help me to see where I potentially went wrong?

I essentially say: (A) because that is what they are currently doing a lot in law school and is not the same as the author wants them to learn

[Robert Carroll]

hadimadi,

Answer choice (A) is not talking about statutory law but instead about the case law that develops in interpreting it. It's not a "specific paragraph in the group of statutory law" at all. Otherwise, what you said sounds right to me, as I noted in my previous post. The author thinks the study of judicial case law is already adequately done by law schools, and, in fact, overemphasized.

Robert Carroll

[hadimadi]

Ah now I see, thanks for pointing out, i don't know how I got to that

[BMM2021]

Hi,

I can understand why A is correct - I quickly misread it as a reference to statute-specific knowledge, which I would have expected to follow from statue-specific education.

Regardless, I didn't like answer E - and thus chose it as the "except" case - because of the word "drafting." To me, this answer choice referred to language concerns that made the writing of/passage of statutes difficult within the legislature, but those kind of background details seemed to fall outside the scope of the statute education advocated for within the passage. The author strictly identifies the benefits of a statute education as helping law students interpret "...statutes' meanings and their applicability to relevant situations..." and "...enabl[ing] the student to see how these laws form a coherent whole." While I could understand how background issues that occur during statute drafting might be woven into that kind of curriculum, I don't see how we can assume that's the case from the information in the passage.

While I understand that this answer choice could alternatively be referring to issues with interpretation of statutes that occur after passage of the laws, the use of the word "drafting" does not imply that. Drafting of legislation is a specific process that happens well before statutes must be interpreted by lawyers or the courts, in my mind. Anyway, my main concern is that because of this word, I didn't like any of the answers. Not sure how to overcome this in the future?

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Drafting is inevitably tied to the interpretation of statutes, BMM. Without understanding the difficulty of word choice in drafting a law, how can you understand the meaning of that law? Statutory interpretation hinges on the specific words used, and the choices lawmakers make when drafting the specific statute play directly into that interpretation.

If you want a hint from the text of the passage itself, look no further than the first sentence, which specifically states that understanding the formulation of statutes is a critical legal skill. The formulation of statutes can also be understood as the drafting and word choice of the legislature when writing and passing laws.

Hope that helps!