Question Details

DIRECTIONS for questions 6-9: The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the best answer for each question.


How can we know what someone else is thinking or feeling, let alone prove it in court? In his 1863 book, A General View of the Criminal Law of England, James Fitzjames Stephen, among the most celebrated legal thinkers of his generation, was of the opinion that the assessment of a person’s mental state was an inference made with “little consciousness.” In a criminal case, jurors, doctors, and lawyers could watch defendants— scrutinizing clothing, mannerisms, tone of voice—but the best they could hope for were clues. . . . Rounding these clues up to a judgment about a defendant’s guilt, or a defendant’s life, was an act of empathy and imagination. . . . The closer the resemblance between defendants and their judges, the easier it was to overlook the gap that inference filled.


Conversely, when a defendant struck officials as unlike themselves, whether by dint of disease, gender, confession, or race, the precariousness of judgments about mental state was exposed. In the nineteenth century, physicians who specialized in the study of madness and the care of the insane held themselves out as experts in the new field of mental science. Often called alienists or mad doctors, they were the predecessors of modern psychiatrists, neurologists, and psychologists. . . . The opinions of family and neighbors had once been sufficient to sift the sane from the insane, but a growing belief that insanity was a subtle condition that required expert, medical diagnosis pushed physicians into the witness box. . . . Lawyers for both prosecution and defense began to recruit alienists to assess defendants’ sanity and to testify to it in court. Irresponsibility and insanity were not identical, however. Criminal responsibility was a legal concept and not, fundamentally, a medical one.


Stephen explained: “The question ‘What are the mental elements of responsibility?’ is, and must be, a legal question. It cannot be anything else, for the meaning of responsibility is liability to punishment.” . . . Nonetheless, medical and legal accounts of what it meant to be mentally sound became entangled and mutually referential throughout the nineteenth century. Lawyers relied on medical knowledge to inform their opinions and arguments about the sanity of their clients. Doctors commented on the legal responsibility of their patients. Ultimately, the fields of criminal law and mental science were both invested in constructing an image of the broken and damaged psyche that could be contrasted with the whole and healthy one. This shared interest, and the shared space of the criminal courtroom, made it nearly impossible to consider responsibility without medicine, or insanity without law. . . . Physicians and lawyers shared more than just concern for the mind.


Class, race, and gender bound these middle-class, white, professional men together, as did family ties, patriotism, Protestantism, business ventures, the alumni networks of elite schools and universities, and structures of political patronage. But for all their affinities, men of medicine and law were divided by contests over the borders of criminal responsibility, as much within each profession as between them. Alienists steadily pushed the boundaries of their field, developing increasingly complex and capacious definitions of insanity. Eccentricity and aggression came to be classified as symptoms of mental disease, at least by some.

The last paragraph of the passage refers to “middle-class, white, professional men”. Which one of the following qualities best describes the connection among them?

Options

A

The borders of criminal responsibility.

B

Eccentricity and aggression.

C

Empathy and imagination.

D

The opinions of family and neighbours.

Show Answer

Correct Answer :

Option A

The borders of criminal responsibility.

Solution :

The correct option is The borders of criminal responsibility.


To understand why this is the best description of their connection, we need to closely examine the final paragraph of the passage. The phrase "middle-class, white, professional men" refers specifically to the two groups of professionals discussed throughout the text: the physicians (alienists or medical experts) and the lawyers.


The passage notes that these men shared many social and demographic affinities, such as class, race, and education. However, it specifically highlights their professional intersection by stating: "But for all their affinities, men of medicine and law were divided by contests over the borders of criminal responsibility, as much within each profession as between them." This sentence indicates that the central issue bringing them together in the shared space of the courtroom—their primary professional battleground and point of mutual engagement—was the ongoing debate over defining criminal responsibility. Even though it was a source of "contests" or division in their viewpoints, it was the very subject that connected their respective fields.


We can also confidently eliminate the other choices based on information from the text:


Eccentricity and aggression: The passage mentions these simply as behaviors that "came to be classified as symptoms of mental disease" by the alienists, not as a quality or connection describing the professional men themselves.


Empathy and imagination: In the first paragraph, the author describes how assessing a defendant's guilt based on mere clues was "an act of empathy and imagination." This refers to a specific process of inference used in the courtroom, rather than the core connection uniting the medical and legal professions mentioned in the last paragraph.


The opinions of family and neighbours: The second paragraph points out that these opinions "had once been sufficient to sift the sane from the insane." This describes an outdated historical practice, not the bond between the modern legal and medical professionals.


Therefore, the shared professional focus that most deeply connects these men is the continuous negotiation over the borders of criminal responsibility.

Unlock Our Free Library

Access expert-curated educational resources and study materials—completely free.

Discover more resources

You may also like

Mock Tests

View All
  • CLAT
  • intermediate
  • 2 hours
  • current affairs, english, general knowledge, legal reasoning, logical reasoning, quant

  • CLAT
  • intermediate
  • 2 hours
  • current affairs, english, general knowledge, legal reasoning, logical reasoning, quant

Ask AI Tutor
5 left
Q1 View Question & Options
AI Tutor is solving this question...
Reading question context & options...