LOGICAL REASONING: What Does the LSAT Have to Do with Law?
How Would The Supreme Court Perform on the LSAT?
A question I often hear is, “Does the LSAT actually have anything to do with law school?” And the answer is, however incredibly obnoxious, yes and no.
You don’t do logic games in law school, I’m sorry to report (because the first semester of law school makes logic games look pretty fun). And you don’t answer multiple choice questions in which you evaluate the logic of arguments.
However, you do use the reading and reasoning skills you’ve developed studying for the LSAT: dissecting arguments to determine their structure,
evaluating their internal coherence, and identifying where and how parties (or judges) disagree on the issue.
Do the kinds of “flaws” we look for on the LSAT actually appear in the cases you’ll read? Law professor Andrew J. McClurg, in a fascinating article that you can download and read for free here, shows us the answer is yes. They do.
McClurg examined a number of logical fallacies in Supreme Court decisions, focusing specifically on Justice Rehnquist (the article is kind of old) for reasons he explains that I won’t get into here. I recently stumbled on the article and plucked a few of my favorite examples to share, followed by LSAT questions that exhibit the same flaws. If you’re curious, geek out by finding the flaws in the Court’s reasoning below and then comparing them to the LSAT questions that are analogous:
1. From Colorado v. Bertine (1987), the fallacy as articulated and reproduced by McClurg is:
First premise: In some cases where property is impounded from a criminal suspect, there is a danger of loss of property, false claims against the police, or danger from the property.
Second premise: In this case, property was impounded from a criminal suspect.
Conclusion: Therefore, in this case, there was a danger of loss of property, false claims against the police, or danger from the property.
The question this reminded me of is PT41, S3, Q20. (Note: It’s not a perfectly analogous flaw, but the essential nature of it is the same.)
2. In what McClurg argues is a general trend in Justice Rehnquist’s reasoning in criminal cases, he offers this example:
Premise: If there is probable cause to search, evidence of illegal activity will probably be found.
Conclusion: Evidence of illegal activity was found, therefore, there was probable cause to search.
Does this look familiar? For one of many examples of this kind if flaw on the test, see PT40, S3, Q17.
3. In US v. Montoya de Hernandez in 1985, the defendant was suspected of smuggling illegal material into the United States. Customs agents at the border wanted to X-ray her, but she declined. The Court wrote that at this point, “the customs inspectors were left with only two practical alternatives: detain her for such time as necessary to confirm their suspicions… or turn her loose into the interior carrying the reasonably suspected contraband drugs.”
Do you see the reasoning flaw, here? This one is a little trickier so I’m going to give it away: those were not, notes McClurg, the only alternatives. A third would have been to send her back to her departure point, Columbia.
There is a similar flaw in PT40, S3, Q12.