Building Capacity for Empirical Legal Research: Some questions about the links between methods and subjects

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Building Capacity for Empirical Legal
ResearchSome questions about the links between
methods and subjects

• Sharon Witherspoon
• Deputy Director

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The Nuffield Foundation

• Founded in 1943
• Concerned initially with science and the then new
  field of academic social sciences
• Investment in infrastructure, including human
  capital

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Nuffield Inquiry into Empirical Research in Law

• Foundations long-standing interest in law and
  legal research, from the beginning but
  particularly from late 1960s
• Inquiry started in 2005
• Involved
• Academics both academic lawyers and non-lawyers
• Policy makers
• Strategic practitioners judges, lawyers, court
  managers
• Both civil law (administrative law, family law,
  etc) and criminal law

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Diagnosis and Understanding

• Is there a problem?
• Why does it matter?
• What are the causes?
• What are the solutions?

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What is the problem?

• Reducing capacity to undertake empirical research
  on law (ERL)
• Cohort of experienced researchers will retire in
  next decade
• Sparse new generation
• Discipline under threat

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What are the causes?

• Law in the academy
• Professional training
• Legal scholarship / legal reasoning
• Absence of critical mass
• Social science
• General decline in empirical research?
• General decline in quantitative training?
• Political science and sociology less
  institutional (than elsewhere?)
• Decline of interest in power and social
  structural forces (as against culture)
• Apprehension about technicality of law
• General problems
• RAE and its effects on incentives
• Inter-disciplinary work (also RAE)

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What are the solutions?

• No quick fix market failure
• Sustained interventions at various points
• Undergraduate course materials for law and social
  sciences
• Summer schools, masters cross-disciplinary
  training
• Post-graduate and PhD
• CRUCIAL links between methods and substantive
  issues
• Hence, centres doing substantive research

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Reasons for choosing to link methods and
substance

• Methods innovation linked to exciting
  intellectual questions
• Normative questions of law linked to empirical
  questions of what is
• Different disciplines attracted
• Economics behaviours and counterfactuals
• Psychology motivations, experiments
• Politics and Sociology linking structures and
  individual actions and decisions
• Linking cutting edge substantive issues with
  TRAINING
• Cross-disciplinary (law and social sciences)
• Critical mass younger people Masters, PhDs,
  Post-docs

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Model of Legal Education and ScholarshipWhere to
break in?