Mantis was a petulantly impatient warrior who was prone to jumping to conclusions and making impulsive decisions. When this habit got himself captured by crocodile bandits, the long wait he was forced to endure in his cage allowed him to find the patience to play dead long enough to ambush his captors.
Our impulsiveness in jumping to conclusions in Legal Reasoning could be best described as suicidal. Only a handful are capable of enduring patience, the key in Legal Reasoning.
A very common mistake in solving Legal Reasoning questions is applying your own knowledge to the question.
Remember, via legal reasoning questions CLAT wants to check your aptitude and not your knowledge of the law.
All you need to do is to read the facts and the principle carefully and simply apply the principle to the facts. Like stated above, legal reasoning question require no prior knowledge and the questions come with a hint.
Even if the principle is obnoxious enough to blow your mind away, viz. ‘Killing somebody is a courageous act and will fetch you a Param Vir Chakra’, you must not get blown away by it. You need to stay within the strict confines of the principle and apply it to the facts in hand, without applying any prior knowledge.
The paper setters generally come up with principles which are on the fringes of reason (a good example could be; ‘any person who speaks in a movie hall and disturbs others that are watching the movie will be banned from entering any movie theater across India for one year’), followed by four options, out of which two, generally, are very close to each other. They deliberately create a situation where there would be a scope of applying outside/prior knowledge, leading to the wrong conclusion. And trust us, that scope would be very tempting as well.
Here is where you would need to understand the significance of being patient and not jump into a conclusion without introspecting the validity of the conclusion vis-a-vis the principle. Hence, Mantis, the patient Mantis, should be your role-model.
Legal Reasoning carries 50 marks in CLAT. It is the most important subject in CLAT because in case of a tie in scores, the higher scorer in Legal Reasoning will get the better rank.