LSAT 107, Section 2, RC Passage 4, Medieval Law

RC Passage 4 Explanation

This is an explanation for passage 4 of LSAT preptest 29, the October 1999 LSAT. This passage is about how medieval law affected women in practice.

This section has paragraph summaries and an analysis of the passage, links to the explanations for the questions are below.

Paragraph Summaries

1. First Half of Paragraph 1: The problem: there isn’t much research into court records, which would show how the law actually affected medieval women.
2. Second Half of Paragraph 1: Examples of questions to answer regarding how women were affected by medieval law. We can answer the questions by researching medieval cases.
3. First half of Paragraph 2: Why the research would be hard: The evidence is on parchments written in Latin or Anglo-Norman French.
4. Second Half of Paragraph 2: The real reason the research hasn’t been done: no one has cared to do it.

Analysis

The author thinks its important to figure out how law affected medieval women. They describe the sort of knowledge they’d like to see researched (paragraph 1), why it would be hard and why it hasn’t been done.

Reading between the lines, male researchers haven’t bothered to look into any of these issues.

It’s important to note that there are some legal issues related to medieval women that have been investigated. This is in line 10; we know how the law was supposed to have affected medieval women.