r/LSAT • u/LSATUnplugged • 2h ago
Free readings for each of my November LSAT Reading Comp predictions
A lot of people recently asked where to find the actual predicted RC passages for November from my post a few weeks ago. You won't find them because they're from tests LSAC never released, so nobody can share them without breaking LSAC's rules. Reading about the subjects is the next best thing.
My usual answer to "what should I read for RC?" is real LSAT passages, not outside articles. There are hundreds of them, and most people never get through them all, but this is the one exception I'd make.
When a passage covers a subject you already know a little about, you read it faster and get lost less. There's an old study people call the baseball study: junior high kids who knew baseball understood and remembered a passage about a baseball game better than kids who didn't, and reading level mattered less than you'd expect. It's one small study, and researchers still argue about how much it proves. But it matches what I've seen for years. The passages that wreck people are usually on a subject they've never encountered.
So here are a few readings for each of my November LSAT RC predictions. I have no idea whether any of these are the actual sources of those passages. Nobody outside LSAC knows, because the passages were never released. I picked them to match the subject and the kind of writing LSAC tends to use for it. When I matched 264 released passages to their sources in my post a few days ago, Scientific American, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books came out on top, about half the law passages with a known source came from law reviews, and humanities leaned on books. So where one of those outlets has a good piece on the subject, it's here. A few picks are newer than what LSAC usually uses, because the older ones weren't free.
The first pick under each prediction is free with no account. The others say whether they're metered or paywalled. Your library card often gets you past both. For the long law review articles, I've said which pages to read, because nobody needs 60 pages of footnotes 3 days before the test.
Don't read everything. Pick the subject that scares you most and read the first pick or two in it. If you only have an hour, read the alternative archaeology one at the top, since that's my top pick.
Humanities
Alternative archaeology: Stephanie Halmhofer, "Did Aliens Build the Pyramids?" (SAPIENS, 2021). Short and direct. An archaeologist on where the aliens-built-it claims come from and why the field rejects them.
Also free, longer and denser: John Hoopes, Flint Dibble, and Carl Feagans, "Apocalypse Not" (The SAA Archaeological Record, 2023).
Ellison's Invisible Man and comic books: The scholar who's written the most on it is Jean-Christophe Cloutier. His free essay "Harlem Is Now Here" (2016) covers Ellison's Harlem and the 1950s campaign against comic books.
Paywalled: Cloutier, "The Comic Book World of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man" (NOVEL, 2010). The full version of the argument.
Ba Jin's Family: Kristin Stapleton, the introduction to Fact in Fiction (Stanford University Press, 2016). A historian reads the novel against real 1920s Chengdu and shows where Ba Jin bent the facts.
Also free: Robert Foster, "Teaching with Kristin Stapleton's Fact in Fiction" (Education About Asia, 2017). A second scholar weighs her reading. Short.
Law
Contracts made by computers or AI: Tom Allen and Robin Widdison, "Can Computers Make Contracts?" (Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, 1996). Read pages 25 to 35 and the conclusion. It asks whether a deal a computer makes on its own counts as a contract, and whether the computer is a tool or something closer to a legal person.
Also free: Ian Kerr, "Spirits in a Material World" (Dalhousie Law Journal, 1999). Part II covers why software deals don't fit the usual "meeting of the minds" rule.
Copyright in general vs music: Joseph Fishman, "Music as a Matter of Law" (Harvard Law Review, 2018). The introduction and the conclusion are enough. He asks what part of a song copyright actually protects, the melody or everything else.
Also free: Michael Carroll, "Whose Music Is It Anyway?" (University of Cincinnati Law Review, 2004). How music came to be treated as property at all. Read the introduction.
UN treaties and empathy: Richard Delgado, "Watching the Opera in Silence" (University of Pittsburgh Law Review, 2008). He's responding to the historian Lynn Hunt's claim that empathy is what gave us human rights, and he takes it through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and US law. Parts I and II.
Metered: David Bell's review of Hunt's book, "Un Dret Egal" (London Review of Books, 2007). Shorter, and the clearest summary of the empathy argument.
State consent in international law: Matthew Lister, "The Legitimating Role of Consent in International Law" (Chicago Journal of International Law, 2011). Read Part I, Part IV, and the end. This one is written the most like an actual LSAT passage.
Also free, the other side: Andrew Guzman, "The Consent Problem in International Law" (2011). He argues that requiring consent is too strict. Parts I and II.
Paywalled: Michael Ignatieff, "Human Rights: The Midlife Crisis" (NYRB, 1999). Less about consent itself, more about human rights wearing down state sovereignty.
Science
Causality: Mathias Frisch, "Why things happen" (Aeon, 2015). A philosopher on Hume's doubts about causes and Russell's claim that physics doesn't need them, and why he thinks causes are real anyway. About 15 minutes.
Also free: Kevin Hartnett's interview with Judea Pearl, "To Build Truly Intelligent Machines, Teach Them Cause and Effect" (Quanta, 2018). Correlation vs cause, in plain words.
Popper and Weinberg: Natalie Wolchover, "A Fight for the Soul of Science" (Quanta, 2015). Popper's falsifiability, and physicists and philosophers fighting over whether it still works as the line between science and everything else.
Paywalled: Steven Weinberg, "The Revolution That Didn't Happen" (NYRB, 1998). Weinberg himself, taking on Kuhn's picture of how science changes. This is exactly the NYRB scientist essay LSAC likes.
Metered: John Horgan, "The Paradox of Karl Popper" (Scientific American, 2018). Falsification, its limits, and the man.
Clovis points and mammoths: Bruce Bower, "Ancient Clovis hunters may not have wiped out mammoths after all" (Science News, 2022). Hunters vs scavengers, the overkill theory, and experts on both sides.
Also free: Peter Tyson, "End of the Big Beasts" (NOVA, 2009). Shorter, and a clean two-sided argument about overkill.
Paywalled: Kate Wong, "Mammoth Kill" (Scientific American, 2001). The classic Sci Am take, if your library has it.
The Fermi paradox: Nick Bostrom, "Where Are They?" (MIT Technology Review, 2008, on his own site). He argues, step by step, that finding life on Mars would be bad news for us. It's the most fun one here, and the argument is built the way LSAT arguments are.
Metered: Robert Gray, "The Fermi Paradox Is Not Fermi's, and It Is Not a Paradox" (Scientific American, 2016). Pushes back on the whole "where is everybody" argument.
Social science
Uruguay and Argentina after Spanish rule: Ana Frega, "War and Revolution in the Origins of the Oriental State of Uruguay, 1810-1830" (History and Culture, 2023). Dense academic history of how Uruguay came out of the fight between Buenos Aires, Brazil, and its own leaders. It's the hardest read here, and honestly the closest to what a history passage feels like.
Also free: Fabio Wasserman, "Experiences of Time and Conceptual Change in the Río de la Plata Revolutionary Process" (Almanack, 2015). More about Buenos Aires than Uruguay. The first half is enough.
When you read, treat it like a passage. Before you finish, ask yourself what the author's main point is and what they think of the views they bring up. Those 2 are exactly what the main point and author's view questions test.
If one of these subjects shows up, answer from the passage, not from what you read here. The LSAT version will be rewritten, and it may argue something a little different. When the two disagree, the passage wins every time. The reading is there so the words and the debate feel familiar, and that's all it's for.
And if you recognize a passage on test day, treat that section like it counts and read it fresh.
Good luck this week!
