PrepTest 128

Topic: Legal Studies

Paragraph 1

• Paragraph note
  • Old Approach and New Approach
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Old Approach - Bankruptcy focuses on punishment
  • New Approach - Bankruptcy as a remedy for individuals/businesses/creditors
  • Critics - Trend to more bankruptcies is bad; we should go back to punishment
  • Author - New approach serves needs of society and lets people participate in economy, so it’s good

Paragraph 2

• Paragraph note
  • Why Old Approach; Author’s rebuttal
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Old approach - Throw people in jail; dissolve businesses
  • Why? - Breaking social contract, need to be removed from society
  • Author - That doesn’t help anyone - creditors don’t get paid, businesses closing disrupts employees and customers

Paragraph 3

• Paragraph note
  • New approach - Underlying beliefs; mechanism; goals
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Underlying beliefs (2) - 1) public good is paramount; 2) public good better served with businesses existing and people not in jail (they can earn and pay back)
  • Mechanism - Courts reorganize debt and transfer assets
  • Still have punitive functions (Examples - public record of bankruptcy; affect credit rating)
  • Goal - Restore business/individual to economic health and get creditors paid

Main Point: Modern bankruptcy laws, with their focus on getting people and businesses back to economic health so that they can repay creditors, are better than the old punitive bankruptcy laws.

Lines 1-6 - An Old Approach and a New Approach

Lines 6-9 - An argument to go back to the old approach

Lines 13-18 - Author’s overall opinion (pro New Approach)

Lines 24-29 - Why Old Approach adopted

Lines 29-34 - Author rebuts

Lines 54-59 - Author sums up her argument

Old Approach/New Approach - The first sentence pretty explicitly raises an Old Approach to bankruptcy law and the shift to a New Approach. This strongly suggests that the Author is going to explore the two approaches to see which one is better, or take elements from each to recommend a “compromise” approach. In this case, we get the former - she concludes the first paragraph by stating that the New Approach “serve[s] the varied interests of the greatest number of citizens.” Paragraph 2 then explains why the Old Approach was adopted, but the Author then pivots away from that (Line 30 - “But”) to show why it wasn’t helpful. She then closes out the passage by spending the last paragraph arguing why the New Approach (modern bankruptcy law) is better - it is the most likely way to restore businesses, individuals, and creditors to economic health. When a passage falls into this Meta-Structure, the Author’s opinion of the New Approach is generally the main point. Since she argues in favor of it here, that should be our main point, as we stated above.

Paragraph 3 had a series of elements in it that are likely to show up in the questions - underlying beliefs, a mechanism, and goals. Each of these are generally important on the exam, so we should have noted where each one is in the paragraph, and also kept quick notes on what they were. While it would take a bit of time to do that while reading, it should save us a lot of time on the questions!