Methodologies of Legal Research: Which Kind of Method for What Kind of Discipline?

Until quite recently questions about methodology in legal research have been largely confined to understanding the role of doctrinal research as a scholarly discipline. In turn this has involved asking questions not only about coverage but, fundamentally, questions about the identity of the discipline.

Is it (mainly) descriptive, hermeneutical, or normative? Should it also be explanatory? Legal scholarship has been torn between, on the one hand, grasping the expanding reality of law and its context, and, on the other, reducing this complex whole to manageable proportions. The purely internal analysis of a legal system, isolated from any societal context, remains an option, and is still seen in the approach of the French academy, but as law aims at ordering society and influencing human behaviour, this approach is felt by many scholars to be insufficient.

Consequently many attempts have been made to conceive legal research differently. Social scientific and comparative approaches have proven fruitful. However, does the introduction of other approaches leave merely a residue of 'legal doctrine', to which pockets of social sciences can be added, or should legal doctrine be merged with the social sciences? What would such a broad interdisciplinary field look like and what would its methods be? This book is an attempt to answer some of these questions.

1. Legal Doctrine: Which Method(s) for What Kind of Discipline?

Mark Van Hoecke

2. The Method of a Truly Normative Legal Science

Jaap Hage

3. Explanatory Non-Normative Legal Doctrine. Taking the Distinction between Theoretical and Practical Reason Seriously

Anne Ruth Mackor

4. A World without Law Professors

Mathias M Siems

5. Open or Autonomous? The Debate on Legal Methodology as a Reflection of the Debate on Law

Pauline C Westerman

6. Methodology of Legal Doctrinal Research: A Comment on Westerman

Jan Vranken

7. The Epistemological Function of 'la Doctrine'

Horatia Muir Watt

8. Maps, Methodologies and Critiques: Confessions of a Contract Lawyer

Roger Brownsword

9. Legal Research and the Distinctiveness of Comparative Law

John Bell

10. Does One Need an Understanding of Methodology in Law Before One Can Understand Methodology in Comparative Law?

Geoffrey Samuel

11. Comparative Law, Legal Linguistics and Methodology of Legal Doctrine

Jaakko Husa

12. Doing What Doesn't Come Naturally. On the Distinctiveness of Comparative Law

Maurice Adams

13. Promises and Pitfalls of Interdisciplinary Legal Research: The Case of Evolutionary Analysis in Law

Bart Du Laing

14. Behavioural Economics and Legal Research

Julie De Coninck

15. Theory and Object in Law: the Case for Legal Scholarship as Indirect Speech

Bert Van Roermund