Q18

[griffin.811]

The answer to this comes from the first few lines of the passage, lines 1-4.

The remainder of the passage is about how "Realists" find vagueness to lead to indeterminacy.

Thus A is correct.

[ohthatpatrick]

Nice line reference! Let me flesh this explanation out for anyone who was more tempted by the others or confused what they were looking for.

Since the question stem gives us keywords, "most legal scholars today", we need to first find where in the passage it talked about "most legal scholars today".

The closest match we find are the first three sentences, which talk about what legal scholars currently believe.

As the previous poster said, everything following line 9 is about "the realists", who are NOT modern day. They are identified as "an earlier group".

All we know about current legal scholars from the first 9 lines is
- in some cases legal rules don't specify a definite outcome, because there is indeterminacy based on vague language
- most cases DO have clear meanings and definite outcomes

Q18 wants to know which of those "the realists" would agree with.

Since we know from line 9-11 that "the realists" think that indeterminacy pervades every part of the law, that clashes with the 2nd bullet point we know about "current legal scholars". So the only room for agreement is the 1st bullet point.

Let's look for an answer choice that resembles "in some cases legal rules don't specify a definite outcome, because there is indeterminacy based on vague language".

(A) strong match. keep it.
(B) this sounds like just the realists
(C) we know nothing about how modern scholars feel about the "holding and the dicta"
(D) this sounds like just the modern scholars
(E) we know nothing about how modern scholars feel about finding contradictory readings of precedents.