LSAT Author's View Vs. Other Views

For decades, museum conservators operated on a principle that historian Fei Liu calls 'invisibility': the ideal restoration was one that left no trace, blending seamlessly with the original work so that a viewer could not distinguish repaired regions from intact ones. Liu argues that this norm reflected a nineteenth-century commitment to the artwork as a unified object, a stable thing whose meaning resided in its undamaged surface. Beginning in the 1970s, a counter-movement led by conservator Anneliese Brandt insisted that all restoration interventions be made visible upon close inspection—through subtly different brushwork or slightly mismatched fill materials—so that viewers and future conservators could always tell what was original and what was added. Brandt's position has become orthodoxy in major European institutions. Liu's account, while historically careful, treats the shift from invisibility to visibility as a straightforward triumph of professional ethics over aesthetic deception. This framing obscures what is actually at stake. The visibility norm assumes that the relevant audience for a conservator's work is other professionals—curators, future restorers, scholars—who will benefit from a legible record of intervention. But for the ordinary museum-goer, visible restoration can read as damage, distracting from the encounter with the work that the museum is presumably trying to facilitate. Brandt herself acknowledged this tension in her later writings but did not resolve it. A more honest account would recognize that the visibility principle solves one problem—professional accountability—at the cost of another, namely the lay viewer's experience. Neither the older invisibility norm nor the current visibility norm can claim to be neutral; each privileges a particular audience. The choice between them is therefore not a matter of ethics replacing aesthetics, as Liu suggests, but a contested judgment about whom the museum exists to serve.

Which of the following best describes the author's attitude toward Liu's account?

• A Full endorsement of Liu's historical narrative and its ethical conclusions.
• B Acceptance of Liu's historical claims but rejection of the framing those claims are used to support. ✓ Correct
• C Rejection of Liu's historical research as factually inaccurate.
• D Agreement with Liu that the visibility norm represents a triumph of ethics over aesthetics.
• E Indifference to Liu's account, since the author's primary target is Brandt's position.

In studies of urban migration, a longstanding model attributes movement from rural areas to cities primarily to wage differentials. According to economists working in this tradition, prospective migrants compare expected urban earnings—adjusted for unemployment risk—to current rural earnings, and they move when the difference exceeds the cost of relocation. The model has the virtue of parsimony and has generated decades of empirical research that, on the whole, finds wage differentials to be a statistically significant predictor of migration flows. Sociologist Marta Reyes has challenged this framework on the ground that it treats the migrant as an isolated decision-maker, ignoring the dense web of family obligations, remittance expectations, and village-level reputational pressures that shape who actually leaves. Reyes's fieldwork in the Andean highlands documents cases in which young adults migrate despite negative expected earnings differentials, sent by households pursuing risk-diversification strategies rather than individual income maximization. Reyes's findings deserve the attention they have received. They demonstrate that the wage-differential model cannot be the whole story, and they identify mechanisms—particularly household-level risk pooling—that the older literature genuinely missed. Yet Reyes overreaches when she presents her account as a wholesale alternative. The cases she documents are real, but they describe a particular subset of migration: short-distance, family-mediated movement within developing economies. The wage-differential model was developed largely to explain rural-to-urban movement within industrializing economies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it remains a serviceable first approximation for those flows. The right conclusion is not that one framework displaces the other, but that each illuminates a different migration regime.

Which of the following most accurately captures the author's view of the wage-differential model?

• A It is fundamentally flawed and should be replaced by Reyes's household-level account.
• B It correctly explains all forms of migration, including those Reyes studies.
• C It remains useful for certain migration regimes but does not account for all of them. ✓ Correct
• D It treats migrants as isolated decision-makers and therefore cannot be salvaged.
• E It has been empirically refuted by Reyes's Andean fieldwork.

Legal scholar Aditi Banerjee argues that judicial review of administrative agency decisions has become incoherent. Courts purport to apply a deferential standard, asking only whether an agency's interpretation of its governing statute is 'reasonable.' In practice, Banerjee contends, judges treat the reasonableness inquiry as an opportunity to substitute their own preferred reading for the agency's, especially in politically salient cases. The remedy, on her view, is to abandon deference altogether and require courts to interpret statutes de novo, openly exercising the judgment they already covertly exercise. Banerjee's proposal has gained traction among scholars who view current doctrine as a fig leaf for unprincipled decision-making. While Banerjee correctly diagnoses a problem—judicial application of deference is indeed uneven—her proposed cure misidentifies the source of the disease. The unevenness she documents is not produced by the deference standard itself but by the absence of clear criteria for what counts as reasonable. Strengthening those criteria, rather than abandoning deference, addresses the actual defect.

Which of the following statements would the authors of both passages most likely accept?

• A Banerjee's diagnosis of unevenness in judicial application of deference identifies a real phenomenon. ✓ Correct
• B Deference doctrine should be abandoned in favor of de novo statutory interpretation.
• C Agencies possess subject-matter expertise that generalist judges lack.
• D The unevenness in current doctrine is best addressed by strengthening reasonableness criteria.
• E Banerjee's reform would produce worse policy outcomes than current doctrine.