Legal Research Methodology free essay sample

Introduction Legal researchers have always struggled to explain the nature of their activities to colleagues in other disciplines. If Becher’s (1981, p. 111) work continues to represent an accurate account of how academic lawyers are viewed by their peers they have much work still to do in this respect. He found that they were regarded as ‘not really academic †¦ arcane, distant and alien: an appendage to the academic world †¦ vociferous, untrustworthy, immoral, narrow and arrogant’.Their research fared no better, being dismissed as ‘†¦ unexciting, uncreative, and comprising a series of intellectual puzzles scattered among large areas of description’. This chapter therefore presents a welcome opportunity to explain the actual nature of legal research (or ‘legal scholarship’ as it is more usually described) to researchers from the other component disciplines within the built environment. The built environment is usually considered to be an interdisciplinary (or, at the very least, a multidisciplinary) field linking the disciplines of management, economics, law, technology and desig n (Chynoweth, 2006). We will write a custom essay sample on Legal Research Methodology or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page The field as a whole can benefit from an improved understanding of each of its component disciplines, and from the greatest possible involvement of each of these in its collective research agendas. The current chapter aims to assist this process in the context of the law discipline. Specifically, it attempts to describe the nature of research within that discipline by reference to the epistemological, methodological and cultural features which distinguish it from other forms of built environment research.It will be seen that the vertical axis of the matrix represents the familiar distinction between pure research which is undertaken for a predominantly academic constituency, and applied work which generally serves the professional needs of practitioners and policy makers. However, in the present context, the more interesting distinction is that between doctrinal and interdisciplinary research which is represented by the horizontal axis. Doctrinal legal research Doctrinal research (on the right in Figure 3. 1) is concerned with the formulation of legal‘doctrines’ through the analysis of legal rules.Within the common law jurisdictions legal rules are to be found within statutes and cases (the sources of law) but it is important to appreciate that the y cannot, in themselves, provide a complete statement of the law in any given situation. This can only be ascertained by applying the relevant legal rules to the particular facts of the situation under consideration. As will be discussed below in the section on methodology, deciding on which rules to apply in a particular situation is made easier by the existence of legal doctrines (e. g. , the doctrine of consideration within the law of contract).These are systematic formulations of the law in particular contexts. They clarify ambiguities within rules, place them in a logical and coherent structure and describe their relationship to other rules. The methods of doctrinal research are characterised by the study of legal texts and, for this reason, it is often described colloquially as ‘black-letter law’. Normative character of doctrinal research Doctrinal research is therefore concerned with the discovery and development of legal doctrines for publication in textbooks or journal articles and its research questions take the form of asking ‘what is the law? in particular contexts. At an epistemological level this differs from the questions asked by empirical investigators in most other areas of built environment research. This is perhaps most obvious in a comparison with research in the natural sciences which typically seeks to explain natural phenomena through studying the causal relationships between variables. Epistemologically, this is clearly very different from the interpretive, qualitative analysis required by doctrinal research.