medium · LSAT Logical Reasoning
Legal scholar: The practice of 'distinguishing' lets a court avoid an inconvenient precedent by identifying some factual difference between the earlier case and the one before it, then declaring the precedent inapplicable. Defenders praise distinguishing as a source of needed flexibility, since it allows the law to adapt without formally overturning settled rules. Yet each time a court distinguishes a case on a narrow ground, it adds another exception that future lawyers and citizens must track. Over many cases this produces a thicket of fine distinctions whose combined effect is reasoning so convoluted that no one can reliably predict how the rule will apply next.
Which one of the following characterizations of 'distinguishing' is most strongly supported by the scholar's remarks?
- It offers genuine adaptability, yet the accumulated exceptions it generates can erode the very predictability the law is meant to supply.
- It is chiefly a procedural device by which activist judges quietly escape binding precedents they happen to find politically objectionable.
- It keeps the legal system stable and reliably foreseeable for ordinary businesses and citizens even during periods of rapid social change.
- It is, on the scholar's account, the single most effective means available anywhere for correcting the substantive mistakes of lower courts.
- It ought to be abolished outright, since whatever benefit in flexibility it offers is plainly outweighed by the lasting confusion it creates.
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