In England the burden of history weighs heavily on common law, that unwritten code of time-honored laws derived largely from English judicial custom and precedent. ███
Intro to Topic ·English common law
Unwritten body of law that comes from a long history of jurisprudence.
Theoretical Reason ·The law is a unified coherent system
At any given moment, the law can be understood as a logical whole, a coherent system. The past matters only in that it represents past states of the system.
To study common law historically means to pay attention to fiction, perception, and memory. Tradition also means rewriting and adapting to contemporary circumstances.
Passage Style
Critique or debate
Problem-analysis
8.
It can be inferred that ███ ██████ ██ ███ ███████ ████████ █████ ███ ██ ███ █████████ █████ ███ ███████ ██ ███ ██ ████████ ██ ██████ ██████████████
Question Type
Author’s perspective
Implied
As P2 shows, the author thinks that modern jurisprudence ignores the influence of history.
a
Modern jurisprudence misinterprets ███ ██████ ██ ███ █████ ██████████
Supported, because the author thinks that history is important to the legal tradition, but modern jurisprudence rarely treats history as important to law.
51%
b
The history of ███ ██████ ███ ████████ █████ ██ ██████ ███ ██ ██ ██████████ ███ ██████████ ██ ██████ ██████████████
Anti-supported. The author thinks the history of common law is critical to understanding contemporary law.
8%
c
The history of ████ ██ ██ ██ ██ ██ ████ ██████████ ██ ██████ ██████████████ ██ ████ ███████ ██ █ ██████ ██ █████ ██████ ████ ██ █ ████████ █████
Not supported. The author has a favorable view toward Goodrich, who argues that we should treat law as more like a literary text than as a system of rules.
Anti-supported, because the author believes mainstream jurisprudence exaggerates the coherence of law. The author believes the law is not as coherent as modern jurisprudence portrays it.
Anti-supported, because the author believes mainstream theories treat law as the application of rules to objective facts in order to not be dispiriting for the public.
10%
Difficulty
51% of people who answer get this correct
This is a very difficult question.
It is slightly harder than the average question in this passage.
CURVE
Score of students with a 50% chance of getting this right
25%154
164
75%173
Analysis
Author’s perspective
Author’s perspective
Stems that ask us to find an answer the author is most likely to agree with.
Stems asking us to infer an idea implied by the claims in the passage (as opposed to identifying an idea that appears explicitly). Similar to most strongly supported questions in LR.
Critique or debate passages contain multiple points of view on a particular subject. Sometimes the author takes sides and participates in the critique or debate, other times the author merely reports the debate.
Passages that present a particular problem and then discuss the implications of that problem. They also often explore one or more solutions to that problem (although they don’t have to).