Assertion (A) : There are more laws on the books today than ever before, and…

Concept

An assertion–reason item asks for three judgements, each made independently of the others: the standing of the assertion on its own terms, the standing of the reason on its own terms, and whether the reason — if accepted — accounts for why the assertion holds. A descriptive claim reports how things are and is judged as a description; a prescriptive claim of the form “to achieve X we must do Y” proposes a course of action and cannot be affirmed until the causal premise behind it is supported. And two quantities rising together establish correlation only: an explanatory link additionally requires evidence that one of them produced the other.

Application

1. Standing of the assertion. It is purely descriptive and reports a direction of change over time: more enacted law now than before, and more crime now than before. A claim of that kind is the sort of thing that could in principle be checked against a record, and neither half of it is internally problematic. The stock of statute law grows for a structural reason — legislatures enact far more than they repeal, so the body of law only accumulates. The companion claim about crime is offered as a plain observation, the item puts nothing against it, and nothing in the reasoning that follows depends on its exact size. Stated without a jurisdiction or a measure it is a broad claim rather than a precise one, but a broad description is still assessable as a description — and that is exactly what separates it from the reason. So the assertion is taken as true.

2. Standing of the reason. It is not a description but a prescription — that laws must be eliminated in order to reduce crime — resting on an unstated causal premise: that the laws themselves are what produce the crime. Nothing is offered in support of that premise, and the prescription’s force depends entirely on which sense of “crime” is meant, with the two senses pulling in opposite directions. In the legal sense, repealing the statutes would abolish the offences by definition, so crime would indeed fall — but only as a verbal consequence of redefining it, with nothing about behaviour changed. In the sense of the underlying harmful conduct — the sense in which reducing crime is worth wanting at all — nothing is offered to show that repeal would reduce anything. Because the prescription is stated without qualification, it can be neither affirmed nor rejected outright: it is trivially true on one reading and unsupported on the other. That unresolved split is what makes its standing doubtful rather than true or false.

3. Explanatory link. Even if it were granted, the reason says what ought to be done in future, while the assertion reports how things stand now. A prescription for future action is not an account of a present state of affairs, so the reason is not the correct explanation of the assertion.

Cross-check

The joint rise the assertion describes is a correlation, and a common cause fits it comfortably: a larger, more regulated society both enacts more law and, being larger, sees more offending in absolute terms, with neither quantity producing the other. Treating that correlation as causation is precisely the step the reason takes, which is why it fails as an explanation rather than merely being a weak one.

Result: the assertion is true, the reason is doubtful, and the reason is not the correct explanation of the assertion.