May 2020 LSAT Section 3 Question 16

Journalist: When judges do not maintain strict control over their courtrooms, lawyers often try to influence jury ver...

Elizabeth25 on May 17 at 01:57AM

Slightly confused on D

I almost choose D but then went back and eliminated because it says "its seldom effective where jurors are also presented with LEGITIMATE EVIDENCE. What about when jurors are not presented with legitimate evidence is it still seldomly effective? What if in those cases it is effective, how would the answer really weaken? I hope that made sense.

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Emil-Kunkin on May 21 at 09:47PM

You're right that in cases with no legitimate evidence presented, D wouldn't weaken (although in those cases we would likely have an independent reason to doubt the verdict), but that still weakens the argument by a lot. The conclusion is that in all instances of bluster we have reason to doubt the outcome. D tells us that this is untrue for a large subset of cases. A weakener does not need to completely kill the argument, just to make it weaker, which D does here.