Every lawyer remembers the unpleasant rite of passage that is taking the LSAT, the standardized test for law school admissions. The most distinctive component of the LSAT is known colloquially as the “logic games” section (though its formal name is “analytical reasoning”). This section, full of hypothetical dinner parties with picky guests and distinctive seating requirements, is meant to test the ability of future lawyers to apply the types of overlapping and interacting rules that we often must untangle to apply the law.
A much-simplified version of the type of question one might see in the logic games section is as follows: A restaurant calls its happy hour menu the “5:00 PM and after” menu, but the menu is actually available up to an hour before 5:00 pm as well as up to an hour after 5:00 PM. Yesterday, John ordered off the “5:00 PM and after” menu. Today, John ordered at the same restaurant an hour earlier than he did yesterday. Was the happy hour menu necessarily available when John ordered today?
If you answered “no,” you just successfully avoided a logical fallacy that multiple federal courts of appeals had fallen victim to, before finally being corrected by the Supreme Court yesterday. The history of these decisions is a case study in how flimsy logic and basic errors can be perpetuated by too much deference to precedent, as well as (perhaps) some motivated reasoning.
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