What does the LSAT have to do with Law School?
When I first started preparing for the LSAT, I found myself a little frustrated by the logic games section in particular but also by the logical reasoning component of the test. What, I asked, could this possibly have to do with who is ready or able to go to law school? In particular, I ruefully compared the LSAT to other exams for professional school admissions, such as the MCAT and GMAT, which test more substantive knowledge about chemistry or specific mathematical formulas, directly relevant to coursework in medical and business schools. I thought the LSAT had little to do with law school and was something of a throwaway, but the more time I spend in law school (I’m a 3L) the more I think this is not really the case.
Logic Games?!
The skills learned for logic games have been quite helpful in two ways, one tactical and one practical. The tactical skill the logic games taught me was the habit of developing a system for organizing information and spelling out relationships. Lots of times on law school exams professors give you a problem that has several ambiguities, and these ambiguities can link up. The best answers are the ones that figure out the ramifications of every likely (that is legally colorable) argument. For example, did the parties form a contract for a lease of the house or didn’t they? And in either case, when one party moved in and then damaged the door, did that party do so negligently? What ramifications are there for each party under the four potential combinations of resolutions to these two questions? Is your head spinning yet?
When you’re taking an exam in law school, you must recognize all these possibilities and figure out which ones are sufficiently probable to merit discussion in a time and space controlled writing context (i.e. a really stressful exam in a little blue book!). You also need to be careful not to forget any possibilities, and that’s where it comes in handy to have a systematic tool for approaching these ambiguities, just like on the logic games section.
Second, for a more practical application of logic games skills, it’s very helpful to have a truly strong grasp on the conditional logic you need to learn for binary grouping games and sometimes for assignment games. Lots of people don’t study conditional logic unless they happen to take a course on it in college, but this is one piece of formal knowledge that is quite useful in law school. For example there are often questions in court cases as to whether a sufficient condition is also a necessary one (don’t worry if you haven’t yet started studying for the LSAT and don’t have a clue what that means – you’ll learn it). For example, if declaring all of her assets is sufficient for a corporate board member to fulfill her obligation to be financially transparent, does that mean that declaring all her assets is also necessary for the board member to fulfill her obligations? And vice versa?
More on the other sections in a few days…