- Law professors play an important role in conducting legal research that benefits both the academic world and legal system. However, there are differing views on the types and value of legal research. - Doctrinal research involves analyzing legal rules and principles to establish coherence and clarify ambiguities. It is important for consolidating dispersed legal materials but may lack theoretical ambition. - "Deep" or non-doctrinal research, such as interdisciplinary legal fields, better qualifies as academic by transcending what practitioners can do. However, dispersing legal scholars may diminish engagement between them. - Without law professors, doctrinal research could still be conducted by practitioners, but diversity and impact of legal research may decrease as deep

1. World Without Law
Professors
PREETI KANA SIKDER
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
DEPARTMENT OF LAW & JUSTICE

2. Legal Research and
Writing

3. Julius von
Kirchmann ,
German Jurist
LEGAL RESEARCH IS
WORTHLESS
BECAUSE IT DOES
NOT AIMTO
ESTABLISH GENERAL
TRUTHS BUT MERELY
TO SUPPORTTHE
CURRENT LEGAL
SYSTEM.

4. A.W.B. Simpson,
British Legal
Historian
“It is not easy to see that
law is a discipline in the
usual sense. What truth do
lawyers come up with?
What are the greatest legal
discoveries of the past ten
years, or fifty years, or even
a hundred?
There do not seem to be
any.”

5. 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
Tony Becher on Academic Lawyers

6. What would be the consequence
if law professors are not carrying
out research anymore?

7. Types of Legal Research
Self-Interested Research
Doctrinal Research
Deep Legal Research

9. Two variants of Self Interested
Legal Research
Publications
written for
professional
advancement
Writing as an act of
self definition

10. What is Doctrinal Research?
Concerned with the formulation of legal doctrines
through the analysis of legal rules

11. Examples of Doctrinal Legal
Research?
Text books, Casebooks, Commentaries,Case
notes

12. Richard Allen Posner, economist and
judge of USA said in 2007 about merit of
doctrinal research
“The messy work product of the judges and
legislators requires a good deal of tidying
up, of synthesis, analysis, restatement, and
critique.These are intellectually demanding
tasks, requiring vast knowledge and the
ability (not only brains and knowledge and
judgment, but also Sitzfleisch – which
means stamina) to organize dispersed,
fragmentary, prolix, and rebarbative
materials.”

13. Richard Allen Posner, economist and
judge of USA said in 2007 about merit of
doctrinal research
“These are the tasks that lack the theoretical
breadth or ambition of scholarship in more
typically academic fields.Yet they are of
inestimable importance to the legal system
and of greater social value than much
esoteric interdisciplinary legal scholarship.”

14. Doctrinal Research
 A research into legal rules, principles, concepts or
doctrines.
 Involves a rigorous systematic exposition, analysis
and critical evaluation of legal rules, principles or
doctrines and their inter-relationship.
 Concerns with critical review of legislations and of
decisional processes and their underlying policy.

15. Why Doctrinal Research?
 Legal rules are to be found within statutes and cases
(the sources of law) but it is important to appreciate
that they 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.
 Deciding on which rules to apply in a particular
situation is made easier by the existence of legal
doctrines.

16. Why Doctrinal Research?
 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’.

17. Nature 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.

18. Nature of Doctrinal Research
 The process of doctrinal analysis is more at home within the
humanities than the sciences. Its approach involves the
development of scholastic arguments for subsequent
criticism and reworking by other scholars, rather than any
attempt to deliver results which purport to be definitive and
final.
 Any ‘methodologies’ in this type of research are therefore
employed subconsciously by scholars (and by practising
lawyers) who would most usually consider themselves to be
involved in an exercise in logic and common sense rather
than in the formal application of a methodology as
understood by researchers in the scientific disciplines.

19. Nature of Doctrinal Research
 Legal rules are normative in character as they dictate how
individuals ought to behave (Kelsen, 1967).
 They make no attempt either to explain, predict, or even to
understand human behaviour. Their sole function is to
prescribe it. In short, doctrinal research is not therefore
research about law at all.
 In asking ‘what is the law?’ it takes an internal, participant-
orientated epistemological approach to its object of study
(Hart, 1961) and, for this reason, is sometimes described as
research in law.

20. Validity of Doctrinal Research
 Scientific research, in both the natural and social
sciences, relies on the collection of empirical data,
either as a basis for its theories, or as a means of
testing them.
 In either case, therefore, the validity of the research
findings is determined by a process of empirical
investigation.
 In contrast, the validity of doctrinal research
findings is unaffected by the empirical world.

21. Validity of Doctrinal Research
 The actual process of analysis by which doctrines are
formulated owes more to the subjective, argument-based
methodologies of the humanities than to the more
detached data-based analysis of the natural and social
sciences.
 The normative character of the law also means that the
validity of doctrinal research must inevitably rest upon
developing a consensus within the scholastic community,
rather than on an appeal to any external reality.

22. Doctrinal Legal Research
Methodology

23. Deep Legal Research
Negative Definition?

24. WilliamTwining, Professor, UCL Law School
“Deep research
has to transcend
research that
could equally be
done by
practitioners.”

25. JeremyWebber, Professor of Law,
University ofVictoria
“Law schools are…best
conceived as a parallel
branch of the profession,
with their own standards
of excellence and their
own purposes.”

26. What is Deep Research?
 Non-doctrinal original forms of legal
research should qualify as deep research.
 The prime examples are the ‘legal X’ and
the ‘law and X’ fields such as legal
philosophy, legal sociology, law and
economics, law and finance etc.

27. What would be the consequence
if law professors are not carrying
out research anymore?

28. Possible consequences in case of
Doctrinal Research
 Other lawyers would fill the gap of doctrinal publications
to some extent.
 The practitioners who teach at the purely professional
law schools would transform their teaching materials into
text books.
 Practitioners themselves would demand commentaries
and handbooks which explain and consolidate the law.
 Government and legislators may create a system in which
they pay directly for doctrinal treatment of a particular
field of law

29. Another aspect of
researching by law professors
Law professors often operate as well-paid
research assistants for judges and
governments

30. Peter Birks, Professor of Civil law in
Oxford
The state, it might be said, pays a massive subsidy
to the law publishers. The publishers make their
profits from the dissemination of the results of
research, passing back in the form of royalties a
relatively small thank you to the author.

31. Alternate Scenario
 The Government and the legislator may create a
system in which they pay directly for doctrinal
treatment of a particular field of law
 Judges could be provided with research assistants
(similar to clerks at highest US and GermanCourts)
 Government may establish permanent advisory
institutions, like law commissions
 Govt. can call tenders to support doctrinal research
on particular legal questions

32. What would happen to Deep
Research?

33. Changed initial scenario: Academic Dinner PartyTest

34. Beneficial effects on quality of research?
Diversity of legal research would
increase.
Legal scholars can get exposure to
better training facilities.
The bond with other disciplines may
increase the impact of legal research.

35. Jeffrey Lipshaw, Professor of Law
“How many legal scholars are
still toiling merely in the
explication of the self contained
system? Not many, I think. Skim
through SSRN for more than a
few minutes. To the contrary,
almost all of us are bringing law
and insights to this discipline.”

36. Costs of reallocation?
 A dispersion of scholars with interests in legal
research into various disciplines would necessarily
diminish the engagement between such scholars.
 Other social sciences may just look at law under the
aspect of its ‘use value’.
 Other social scientists would presumably have little
interest in ‘basic interdisciplinary legal research’.

37. What next?

38. Results of a world without law
professors
Purely Professional
Law School
Law related
activities in other
parts of the
University

39. Wilhelm Von Humboldt: the most
influential education official in German
history
The Humboldtian Model:
 A concept of academic
education that emerged in the
early 19th century and whose
core idea is
a holistic combination of
research and studies.
 It integrates the arts and
sciences with research to
achieve both comprehensive
general learning and cultural
knowledge

40. Wilhelm Von Humboldt: the most
influential education official in German
history
"There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must
be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain
cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can
afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good
craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless,
regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding
and – according to their condition – well-informed human
beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling,
vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is
always free to move from one occupation to another, as so
often happens in life."

41. Divisions in the current system
Law teachers without
research obligations
 Legal practitioners
contributing to teaching
 In UK, few universities
provide good legal
education but usually do
not have research
ambitions.
Legal research without
teaching
 A research professor’s
primary effort is in
research rather than
instruction.
 Research councils often
finance fellowships that
enable professors to
focus on research for a
substantial period of time

42. Prof. Mathias M Siems, Durham Law
Schoool
 For which type of legal research
do we need legal academics?
 Could legal scholarship be also
become part of other social
sciences or humanities?
 Do we need law professors to
train lawyers?
 Would it be feasible to separate
education and research?

43. Projections by the author
 It is possible to delegate the training of
prospective lawyers, and to some extent legal
education more generally, to practitioners.
 Doctrinal research can also be well done by legal
practitioners.
 In return, law professors should favour deep
legal research since we already observe an
oversupply of descriptive legal writings.

44. Projections by the author
 Since such deep research is often
interdisciplinary, there is a need to foster
collaboration across disciplines.
 The relationship between teaching and research
can be handled in a flexible way. Universities
should not prescribe a fixed allocation of time,
but if appropriate, let academics specialise in
either teaching or research.

46. THANKYOU