sharon witherspoon deputy director
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Building Capacity for Empirical Legal Research: Some questions about the links between methods and subjects. Sharon Witherspoon Deputy Director. The Nuffield Foundation. Founded in 1943 Concerned initially with science and the then new field of academic social sciences - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
Building Capacity for Building Capacity for
Empirical Legal Research:Empirical Legal Research:
Some questions about the links Some questions about the links
between methods and subjectsbetween methods and subjects
Sharon WitherspoonDeputy Director
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The Nuffield FoundationThe 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 Nuffield Inquiry into Empirical Research in LawResearch in Law
Foundation’s 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 UnderstandingDiagnosis 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?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?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?What are the solutions?
No quick fix: ‘market failure’
Sustained interventions at various points:
– Undergraduate course materials for law and social sciences
– Summer schools, master’s 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 Reasons for choosing to link methods and substance: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 ScholarshipModel of Legal Education and ScholarshipWhere to break in?Where to break in?
Preponderance of doctrinal legal
research
Undergraduates Taught doctrinal research and limited exposure to
empirical work
Most exit to practice and never return
Senior practitioners and judiciary
PostgraduatesDoctrinal or theoretical work.
No training in empirical methods. Shortage of
supervisors to deal with empirical projects.
Appointment & Mid-careerTeaching core subjects
Continue pattern of doctrinal research