Legal Research Methodology

The study of law is inextricably linked with legal research. Legal research plays a crucial role in the development of law as a discipline and in the growth of the legal profession. The key objectives of legal research are to train students of law in analytical and critical thinking and enable them to acquire high standards of professional competence. Further, legal research facilitates the enrichment of the legal profession by rewarding and incentivizing specialization in emerging areas of law and in studying these fields with an interdisciplinary lens, using inputs from the various sciences and social science.

Legal Research provides a solid basis on which legal policies can be formulated to benefit and rebuild society into a more robust, just, and fair version of itself. Writing research projects is an indispensable requirement that marries theory with practice, as it guides, trains, and encourages the law student to analyse both legal doctrines as well as the real-world impact of law on society.

This book will provide law students, lawyers, and even Judges with theoretical and practical exposure to methods of legal research to best serve their academic and professional needs.

Extract from the Foreword

From "the patterns of legal enquiry process and present trends in legal research" to "legal research and law reforms" to "doctrinal and non-doctrinal legal research" to "data collection techniques", the book covers all aspects of legal research methodology. The last chapter on Jurimetrics is of particular interest. It is said that the expression "Jurimetrics" was coined by Lee Loevinger, an American Jurist who is now considered to be the father of Jurimetrics. But Lee Loevinger himself acknowledges that he was influenced by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., whose celebrated phrase, "For the rational study of the law the blackletter man may be the man of the present, but the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics", was cited by him.

- Justice V. Ramasubramanian,
Judge, Supreme Court of India

• Introduction
• Legal Research — Nature and Scope
• Patterns of Legal Enquiry Process and Present Trends in Legal Research
• Legal Reasoning — A Distinctive Character
• Legal Research and Law Reform
• Doctrinal and Non-doctrinal Legal Research
• Socio-legal Research
• Research Problem: Identification, Selection and Formulation
• Review of Literature
• Research Objectives and Hypothesis
• Research Design
• Data Collection in Legal Research
• Data Collection Techniques
• Sampling Method
• Data Processing, Analysis and Interpretation
• Report Writing
• Law Library and Legal Research
• Jurimetrics