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Legal and empirical legal research (LAW-DS-LEGEMP-24)

LAW-DS-LEGEMP-24

Description

Legal and empirical legal research seminar explores legal methodology and legal argumentation against the backdrop of empirical legal studies employing social science.
The seminar opens with an interactive lecture about writing a research thesis in law, including the difference between legal questions and questions about the law, and the discussion of how to articulate and justify the ‘legal method’ and doctrinal approach. It continues with the discussion of legal reasoning and interpretation.
The second part of the seminar seeks to find synergies between legal research and social science methods or techniques like content analysis, network analysis or case studies.

Two sessions on writing a thesis in law and the legal method and legal reasoning scheduled in November should be particularly helpful to the researchers formulating or reformulating a research question.

The seminar would be a complement to Sergio Puig’s seminar on Research Design, which has a more empirically oriented and methodologically challenging syllabus.

Curriculum

• Session 1 - Interactive lecture (discussion): “Writing a PhD thesis in the law department: Asking legal questions and questions about the law”  
• Session 2 - Seminar: “Articulating the legal approach: Legal method and argumentation”
• Session 3 - Seminar: “Legal and empirical legal approaches: An overview” (a bridge between sessions 1&2 and 4&5)
• Sessions 4 and 5 - Empirical approaches to law (Part I): “Questions, methods, and relationship to legal research” + Empirical approaches to law (Part II): “Selected methods and research techniques”

Structure of individual sessions
In the first part we will critically de-construct an article or part of a monograph through the lens of the author’s approach to their research questions / themes / topics, theoretical background and assumptions, and methodology, intended to raise researchers’ awareness of the building blocks of legal and / or empirical legal research, especially their defining characteristics and differences (aligning the research question with the methodology, formulating a research question against the existing literature, articulating the contribution ….).

The second part will focus on the methodology or a research technique (like hand-coding or network analysis).

All participants will be asked to reflect on their approach to legal research, theoretical background (assumptions) and methodological choices considering their research question. The discussions are intended to clarify individual researcher’s methodology choices and articulate their approach.

All participants will prepare a short reflection on the selected article or a chapter of a monograph, which they will discuss in plenum.

The readings will include mandatory background readings and the readings that the participants will jointly select at the first session. 

The seminar will be taught in person, with the possibility of remote participation in individual sessions in exceptional circumstances.

Reading list: 
https://readinglist.eui.eu/leganto/public/39EUI_INST/lists/2252947260008406?auth=SAML&idpCode=SAML_LEGANTO

The seminar is specially designed for 1st-year researchers. 

First, Second & Third Term: registration from 26 to 30 September 2024

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