A society in which there are many crimes, such as thefts and murders, should not be called "lawless." That is an abus...

Jacob-R on April 18, 2019

Hi @claire_crites,

I’m happy to help. In order to decide between D and E, let’s take a close look at exactly what the question stem is asking.

We can tell right away that this is a “must be true” question. And I can see why the two answers choices you selected are both appealing — they both seem to be saying very similar things about the relationship between societies with crimes and laws.

The key difference is the degree: answer D says:

Some crime -> some laws

Whereas answer E says

Many crimes -> many laws

What statement in the passage can tell us which one of these answers must be true?

Notice the premise in the middle of the passage: a society with no laws has no crimes. How would we diagram that statement?

No laws -> no crimes.

What is the contrapositive of that statement?

Crimes -> laws.

And notice that that positive framing also means we have found our correct answer, as the plural “crimes” means there must be some crime, and the plural “laws” means that there must be at least some laws! So the correct answer is D. (Nothing in the passage tells us that the degree in this causal relationship would be “many” for both crimes and laws.)

I hope that helps! Please let us know if you have further questions.

faithwood21 on April 28, 2020

Why is A wrong?

waterskieb33 on June 12, 2020

Hello, the thing that is puzzling me is that I thought "many" and "some" were equivalent in the context of the LSAT. Please explain to me the difference.

Thanks!

Emil-Kunkin on August 27 at 02:22AM

If we are diagraming, we generally want to treat a many as a some because we cannot determine if many means more than half, so we default to some. However, thats not what is happening here. We are not using many to refer to a proportion, but to an amount of crime. Here, many just means that crime is common.

A is wrong because the passage does not prove that if there are laws then there are crimes. The passage does not foreclose the possibility that there could be laws, but they are never broken.