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 device by which activist judges escape precedents they find politically objectionable.
- It keeps the legal system stable and foreseeable for businesses and citizens during periods of rapid social change.
- It is the single most effective means available for correcting the mistakes of lower courts.
- It should be abolished, since any benefit in flexibility is outweighed by the confusion it creates.
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