QUESTION TEXT: Lawyer: In addition to any other penalties…
QUESTION TYPE: Principle – Justify
CONCLUSION: It’s unfair to charge nonviolent criminals the $30 victim surcharge.
REASONING: The surcharge is used to compensate victims of violent crimes.
ANALYSIS: On principle–justify questions, you must connect the facts in the stimulus to the moral conclusion. This conclusion says that it’s “unfair” to charge nonviolent criminals the surcharge. But we have no evidence about what makes something unfair.
The right answer will say that a situation with the facts in the stimulus is unfair. So, for example “It’s unfair to pay a surcharge that supports victims of violent crime if your crime wasn’t violent.”
___________
- This answer can only support increasing the penalty, since a $30 fine will do very little to deter most people.
- This doesn’t match the facts. All criminals must pay $30, sure. But presumably a murderer still gets a worse overall punishment than someone who steals a chocolate bar.
- This answer provides a necessary condition for a surcharge. So if the stimulus violated this necessary condition, this would be the right answer.
However, the surcharge is used entirely for services, so the stimulus complies with this answer. So this can’t help, since we’re looking for a reason not to have a surcharge. - CORRECT. This works. Currently, nonviolent criminals must pay the surcharge even though it’s used to help victims of more violent crimes. This principle says that’s wrong.
- The author was arguing that nonviolent criminals shouldn’t pay a surcharge. This answer gives a reasons why thieves (a type of generally nonviolent criminal) should pay a surcharge. This is the opposite of what we want.
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Cicely Jeter says
Which test dates are associated with each one of your books. I just did a reading comp from December 1996, passage 2. How do I find that in your explanations?
Thank you
TutorLucas (LSAT Hacks) says
To find the practice test number associated with the date, you just need to do a google search in this format: “Month Year LSAT”. So, in this case, you’d search “December 1996 LSAT”. The search results will show you that’s Practice Test (PT) 21. If you just have the PT number, you can find the date by searching “PT Number LSAT”, e.g. “PT 62 LSAT”, which is December 2010. Graeme hasn’t released the explanation of this PT yet, but he has released explanations for PT’s 62-77 and 29-38. You can find them here: https://lsathacks.com/explanations/
You can find the PDF’s of Graeme’s explanations here: https://lsathacks.com/books/