#26 - Global Reference, Must Be True

[Adam Tyson]

You assume that Bentham's influence is reflected in laws, lanereuden - that is, legislation that overrode common law. But that is not necessarily true, and is not supported by anything in the passage. It may be the case that Bentham's influence was solely restricted to his influence on common law! And even if there has been some legislation changing the rules of evidence, we have no way of knowing that any current law does not "derive from common-law doctrines." Those laws can be derived from common-law doctrines while also incorporating some of Bentham's suggested reforms.

In short, there is no evidence in the passage about any current laws or where they came from.

Just to clarify here, "laws" refers to written codes of law. Think "statutes" and "legislation". But "law" refers to all law, including common-law. So where answer C refers to "some current laws", it means codified (written) laws and excludes common-law (that portion of the law that is based on past precedent and commonly accepted principles that may not be codified in any system of laws), whereas answer B's reference to "modern evidence law" refers to the entire body of law, including both codified law and common-law.

[lanereuden]

You assume that Bentham's influence is reflected in laws, lanereuden - that is, legislation that overrode common law. But that is not necessarily true, and is not supported by anything in the passage. It may be the case that Bentham's influence was solely restricted to his influence on common law! And even if there has been some legislation changing the rules of evidence, we have no way of knowing that any current law does not "derive from common-law doctrines." Those laws can be derived from common-law doctrines while also incorporating some of Bentham's suggested reforms.

In short, there is no evidence in the passage about any current laws or where they came from.

Just to clarify here, "laws" refers to written codes of law. Think "statutes" and "legislation". But "law" refers to all law, including common-law. So where answer C refers to "some current laws", it means codified (written) laws and excludes common-law (that portion of the law that is based on past precedent and commonly accepted principles that may not be codified in any system of laws), whereas answer B's reference to "modern evidence law" refers to the entire body of law, including both codified law and common-law.

Perhaps my assumption is large, but so is yours. To me, I read some current laws [e.g. modern evidence law] do not derive from common-law sources, which indeed would be true if Bentham had an influence, which in fact did.

[Adam Tyson]

I'm not assuming anything, lanereuden. I'm saying there are many possibilities for how Bentham's influence could be reflected in modern evidence law, and that there is no reason to assume that it is in the form of legislation ("laws"). Since his influence could be solely reflected in changes to common law, rather than codified law, there is zero support for answer C. Not that it cannot be true (it could be), but that it is not supported by the evidence in the passage.

[lanereuden]

So you are saying, in absence of any evidence for x to be true, we cannot say with any certainty x is true. Or are you saying in absence of compelling evidence for x to be true, we cannot say with any certainty x is true

[Adam Tyson]

It's not about certainty, because the question is softer than that. It asks only about what is "supported", not what "must be true". It's like the difference between a Strengthen question and a Justify the Conclusion question - for "supported" questions (like a Most Strongly Supported variant in LR) the right answer doesn't absolutely have to be true, but it DOES have to have clear, direct support in the text. You have to pick the answer for which there is MORE support than any other answer, so if two answers seem to be supported, one of them will have support that is more clear and direct, and the other will require your help to make it work. Usually there is only one answer that has any support at all, and that's how I see this one, but if you see some support for another answer you have to do a subjective analysis to determine which one is easier to defend based on the text.

I would say the rule to apply is "in the absence of clear and direct support, you cannot say that an answer is supported." Does that help?

[Desperatenconfused]

Hello,
I know answer C has already been argued for, but the reason I chose this answer was because of line 6, which states that “Among common law doctrines regarding evidence there were, however, principles that today are regarded as bizzare; thus, a well-established (but now abandoned) rule forbade the parties…”

Because there was a principle within common-law doctrines that is now abandoned, I inferred that some of our current laws do not derive from common-law doctrines.

Can someone explain why my thought process is incorrect? I didn’t pick B because it seemed out of scope for me to describe the laws as more or less rigid, since the passage never stated measuring rigidity within laws of evidence.

[Luke Haqq]

Hi Desparatenconfused!

It gets things a bit switched around to infer answer (C) from the language around lines 4 to 8.

The language you included is suggesting that there are some common law doctrines that are no longer in use. That doesn't speak to the origins of our current laws--there could be tons of common law doctrines that are no longer in use, yet it could still also be the case that 100% of our current laws derive from common law doctrines.