The Role of Empirical Legal Studies in Legal Scholarship, Legal Education and Policy Making: A US Perspective

2017 ◽  
pp. 450-475 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah R. Hensler ◽  
Matthew A. Gasperetti
Keyword(s):  
Policy Making ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Legal Studies

Leon Petrażycki and contemporary socio-legal studies

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Cotterrell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Valuable Contribution ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Transnational Law ◽  
The One

AbstractThe work of the Polish–Russian scholar Leon Petrażycki from the early decades of the twentieth century holds a strikingly paradoxical position in the literature of juristic and socio-legal scholarship: on the one hand, lauded as a supremely valuable contribution to knowledge about the nature of law and, on the other, widely neglected and little known. This paper asks how far Petrażycki's theories, expressed in writings by and about him available to an international readership, can provide insight for contemporary socio-legal studies – not as historical background but as living ideas. How far can his work speak to current issues and inform current debates? What obstacles stand in the way of this? Why have few international scholars engaged with his theories despite their rigour and originality? The paper starts from this last issue before addressing the others. It argues that Petrażycki's radical legal theory offers strikingly distinctive resources for rethinking issues about the role of law in multicultural societies, the nature of developing transnational law, and the significance of law as an aspect or expression of culture.

How Much “Law” in Legal Studies? Approaches to Teaching Legal Research and Doctrinal Analysis in a Legal Studies Program

2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (03) ◽  
pp. 297-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Kazmierski
Keyword(s):  
Research Methods ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Multiple Roles ◽  
Methods Course ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Legal Research ◽  
Pedagogical Strategies ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Professional Law

Abstract This article addresses the teaching of legal research methods and doctrinal analysis within a legal studies program. I argue that learning about legal research and doctrinal analysis is an important element of legal education outside professional law schools. I start by considering the ongoing debate concerning the role of legal education both inside and outside professional law schools. I then describe the way in which the research methods courses offered by the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University attempt to reconcile the tension between “law” and legal studies. In particular, I focus on how the second-year research methods course introduces students to “traditional” legal research and doctrinal analysis within a legal studies context by deploying a number of pedagogical strategies. In so doing, the course provides students with an important foundation that allows them to embrace the multiple roles of legal education outside professional law schools.

The role and place of theory in legal education: reflections on foundationalism

Legal Studies ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Legal Education ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

This paper discusses the role of theory in legal education. It builds on an exchange between the author and Neil MacCormick and upon the discussion of the place of theory in legal education in William Twining’s symposium. The paper will move from some fairly concrete issues about the place of jurisprudence in the law curriculum towards some wider problems about the place of theory in legal studies and, finally, will consider some issues about the relationship between theory and jurisprudence. On the way it discusses the relationship between theory and philosophy in a manner which focuses upon the controversy about the foundational claims and pretensions of the theoretical and philosophical enterprise.

scholarly journals Forgotten? The Role of Graduate Legal Education in the Future of the Law Faculty

2014 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 761
Author(s):  
Rosalie Jukier ◽  
Kate Glover
Keyword(s):  
Legal Education ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Graduate Studies ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Canadian Law ◽  
Law Faculty ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Law ◽  
The University

In this article, the authors argue that the longstanding trend of excluding graduate studies in law from the discourse on legal education has detrimental effects on both the discourse and the future of the law faculty. More specifically, disregarding graduate legal education is at odds with the reality of graduate studies in Canadian law faculties today, ignores the challenges of graduate programs in law, and perpetuates inaccurate distinctions about both the career aspirations of law students and the relationship between undergraduate and graduate legal studies. In the authors’ view, these concerns can be overcome by reframing the discourse. Once the purpose of legal education is understood to be the cultivation of jurists and the law faculty is seen as an integrated whole of people, place, and program, graduate legal education moves easily into the discussion on the future of the law faculty. Including graduate studies in the discourse is an opportunity to explore, and be hopeful about, the institutional missions of law faculties and their place in the university, the optimization of legal education at all levels, and the methods by which participants in graduate studies should fulfill their responsibilities to the future of the discipline.

scholarly journals Law and Society Studies in Context: Suggestions for a Cross-Country Comparison of Socio-Legal Research and Teaching

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 1332-1344
Author(s):  
Tanja Herklotz
Keyword(s):  
Legal Education ◽  
Law And Society ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
The World ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Different Parts

AbstractCultures of legal and socio-legal scholarship, like legal cultures themselves, are shaped by their respective historical, cultural, economic, and socio-political context. Socio-legal—or law and society—studies are thus pursued and taught differently in different parts of the world. This Article suggests making socio-legal studies the object of comparative research, so as to understand and explain commonalities, differences, and context dependencies in socio-legal scholarship and teaching in different countries. Such comparative endeavors help to translate between different academic languages and to critically reflect upon one’s own research methods and system of legal education. They prove useful for scholars planning research in other parts of the world or engaging in cross-country collaborative research projects, and for research institutions and policymakers involved in reforming research funding and legal education. But how do we go about comparing socio-legal studies? More specifically, why, what, and how do we compare, and what are the challenges that we may face when pursuing such comparative endeavors? This Article gives an overview of potential research questions that a comparison between socio-legal studies may address, the sources that comparativists may draw on, the methods such a comparative endeavor may use to collect and analyze data, and the challenges researchers may face when attempting to compare socio-legal studies in different parts of the world.

scholarly journals The Limits of Socio-Legal Radicalism

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (6) ◽  
pp. 700-715 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Harrington ◽  
Ambreena Manji
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
25Th Anniversary ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
The Third ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third World

In this review to mark the 25th anniversary of Social and Legal Studies ( SLS), we offer an assessment of the evolution of socio-legal scholarship on the Third World. We seek to locate the journal in the broader history of socio-legal studies and legal education in the United Kingdom and to consider its engagement with the work of Third World scholars. In order to do this, we recall the founding commitment of the journal’s first editorial board to non-western perspectives on law and locate this commitment both historically and biographically. We explore a number of important interventions concerned with socio-legal studies in the Third World, but also point to significant gaps and omissions since 1992. To end, we argue for a reassertion of SLS’s founding commitments to anti-imperial scholarship and the challenges posed by critical, non-western perspectives.

Leibniz as Jurist

2016 ◽  
pp. 640-663
Author(s):  
Alberto Artosi ◽  
Giovanni Sartor
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Development ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
New Synthesis ◽  
Law And Justice

This chapter discusses Leibniz’s contribution to legal theory and the significance of his legal engagements for his intellectual development. It opens by presenting Leibniz’s legal career, listing the sequence of legal offices he assumed and the series of often related writings addressing legal matters. It presents Leibniz’s early legal works, where a new approach to legal scholarship and decision-making is proposed that merges positive and natural law and enriches the law with methods and knowledge from logic, mathematics, physics, and philosophy. This new synthesis provides the basis of his proposed reform of legal education. Leibniz’s relation to Roman law is then considered, focusing on the role of Roman tradition in his approach to law and justice. The last two sections address Leibniz’s logic of deontic modalities and his view of legal reasoning as being both dialectical and presumptive.

scholarly journals The case for clinical scholarship

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Frank Bloch
Keyword(s):  
No Value ◽  
Clinical Education ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Role ◽  
Law Faculty ◽  
The Many

<p>Lines between theory and practice have been blurred considerably in law teaching already, with the spreading influence of clinical legal education around the world.2 In this article, I address the implications of this trend on legal scholarship – the aspect of legal academia where theory-practice tensions tend to be strongest. Following a brief discussion of clinical education’s still uncertain place in the legal academy, I turn to the role of legal scholarship and the potential contributions of clinical education to legal academic literature. Rejecting the strongest criticisms voiced by some clinicians to the effect that scholarship adds little or no value to the primary mission of legal education, which is the training of future lawyers, I explore the many facets of an emerging “clinical scholarship” informed by clinical practice. I also reject the notion that scholarship is less important for clinicians than for other law faculty, by making the case that clinical scholarship strengthens clinical legal education by helping advance its two main goals of improving the quality of law practice and enhancing the public role of the profession.</p>

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document