LSAT 158 | Section 1 | Reading Comprehension: Q23

RC Question 23 Explanation

DISCUSSION: This question is looking for an inference about what legal theorists who advocate for civil liability believe. Paragraph 1 discusses these theorists’ ideas. They say civil liability is less costly: to the government, to corporate reputations, to society. This suggests the theorists believe these lower costs are better. That almost seems too obvious to be the answer, but that counts as an inference on the LSAT.

For example, if I say “Cheese is good, for it is tasty”. You can infer that I think “tasty” is a good quality: the LSAT really and truly counts that as a new inference. Even though it is obvious from what I said.

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1. The legal theorists in paragraph 1 don’t talk about individual corporate employees. Employee behaviour is an idea from paragraph 3, which discusses the ideas of a different set of legal theorists.
2. The theorists did mention procedural protections at the end of paragraph 1. But they didn’t say criminal law shouldn’t have procedure. Instead, they said we should use civil law instead, in this instance. Remember, this answer talks about excessive protections across all criminal law: the theorists weren’t saying we should lower procedural protections in murder trials!
3. The theorists in paragraph 1 actually don’t mention censuring wrongdoing at all! It is the author who mentions this, in the second to last line of paragraph 2.
4. CORRECT. The legal theorists in paragraph 1 criticize criminal liability. Among their criticisms, they say that criminal liability causes more reputational loss than civil liability. For this to be a criticism, they must therefore believe that the reputation loss is too high with criminal liability. (In some cases we want a criminal to suffer reputation loss: it isn’t always bad!)
5. This answer is literally false. The second sentence of the passage says that both criminal and civil penalties harm a company’s reputation!