Empirical Legal Research

This chapter discusses the introduction of empirical research methods and the findings of empirical research into legal scholarship and the practice of law. It presents several basic empirical methods that can be used by lawyers who are not necessarily familiar with social science research and its outcomes. These methods can be helpful to gain some knowledge of what the law ‘does’ in society and how its operation might be transformed. The chapter also discusses a number of examples from empirical legal research practice. Finally, the chapter offers some exercises that aim to help the reader to transfer the information presented in the previous sections into their own research. These exercises ask the reader to use basic (qualitative) empirical methods and test their understanding of the outcomes of empirical research in practice.