PrepTest 136, Section 3, Question 12

Working the answers

• A

  Poor writing would fit the criticism, but the explanation doesn't. B says professors do teach legal writing, in courses and through constraints throughout the curriculum. The problem is the habits that education reinforces, not an absence of instruction.

• B

  B doesn't expect current legal documents to function like fiction. More fundamentally, its case for narrative concerns real events and people; storytelling here doesn't mean inventing fictional characters or motivations. This misstates both the existing practice and the proposed corrective.

• C

  B's criticism doesn't support predicting a well-crafted document. The writer may include important facts, but that alone won't establish the quality praised here.

• D
  Correct

  B says legal analysis strips away “human narrative content” and teaches students to act as though there is no story. A document can therefore be accurate in individual details while losing the larger human dimension. Factual accuracy and a meaningful account of people's experience are different qualities.

• E

  B criticizes the loss of the human story, not a failure to relate facts to legal doctrine. Lawyers could perform the legal analysis competently and still write in the narrow, abstract way B objects to.