JJUB55126U Empirical Research Methods in Law - NOTE: THE COURSE IS CANCELLED IN THE AUTUMN SEMESTER 2018

The purpose of this course is to provide students with insight into the design and implementation of empirical research techniques. Due to what has been labelled an ‘empirical turn in legal scholarship,’ students and researchers within law are increasingly drawing on both quantitative and qualitative research methods in their research. In this wider context, empirical research methods, such as statistical inference and interviews, have played a pivotal role for new and emerging scholarship of a number of different legal fields. Therefore, it is crucial to enable students with the skills and competences to perform original studies that situate their research in current international scholarly currents and to address ongoing debates about the role of empirical work in legal science.

Moreover, law students and legal practitioners increasingly have to compete on a Danish market in which empirical methods have become increasingly prevalent, especially to communicate with the professions connected with the phenomenon of digitalization. In these regard, legal professionals must be able to recognize when empirical research its useful and needs to be applied in legal modern practice. For example, they are required to build evidence base that should be used to assist legislators in developing and ensuring well-founded public policies and to assist judges in the development of authoritative jurisprudence. Moreover, lawyers are increasingly required to review, understand, and employ empirical data in civil and criminal litigation, appellate practice, and governmental affairs. In the light of this developments in the profession, developing and analyzing evidence are critical skills to successful legal professionals (e.g. lawyers, judges, civil servants, etc.). As such, it is important to equip students with the necessary theoretical and practical tools in order to facilitate effective and coherent approaches to conducting empirical research.

The course is designed to provide the students the opportunity to work hands-on with their own BA thesis research question and how to plan and execute an original empirical based project on interview, survey and data analyses techniques. Students will receive feedback on their own research design and its implications. Moreover, the course will laid the basic theoretical foundations and offer the analytical tools the students and researches to participate in more advance methods courses at the MA and PhD level. As result, bachelor students will learn how to frame the theoretical foundation of their research project at the early stages of their BA studies, how to distinguish between methodologies, and how to identify and choose research methods relevant to their main subject(s) of research inquiry.

The course is divided into two parts; The first part introduces the students to the current debates on the use of empiric in legal research. It will also present the students the main concepts and definitions necessary for learning and discussion empirical legal methods, such as: dependent and independent variable, correlation and causation, complementarity and triangulation, etc. (sessions 1 and 2). These two sessions provide the students with the analytical tools to follow and develop discussions on legal methods. The second part of the course reviews and train the students on the most common empirical legal methods (sessions 2 to 9). Each method will comprise diverse sessions where the method is introduced and discussed. After that, the student will be trained on how to perform this specific technique at a basic level of research.