Jean Monnet course: Empirical Legal Research: Design and methods

This course is part of the activities organised by Jean Monnet Chair in EU Law & Politics and, hence, is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

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, MA 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 is useful and needs to be applied in legal modern practice. For example, they are required to build evidence 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. All these tasks requires first the capability to identify new legal solutions to the many and complex issues emerging from new developments in information technology, data analytics and security, politics and policy-making, media, etc. Secondly, it require that tomorrow's lawyers, through training and education, master the new tools of digitalization and data analysis (e.g. statistics, machine learning, among others) to optimally contribute to the development of the legal profession. 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 students the opportunity to work hands-on with their own MA thesis research question and learn how to plan and execute an original empirical project. Students will receive feedback on their own research design and its implications. Moreover, the course will lay the basic theoretical foundations and offer the analytical tools that students need to later participate in more advanced methods courses at PhD level. Master students will learn how to frame the theoretical foundation of their research MA project, how to distinguish between methodologies, and how to identify and choose research methods relevant to their main subjects of research inquiry.

The course is divided into three parts:

• The first part introduces the students to the current debates on the use of empirical methods in legal research.
• The second part presents the students with the main concepts and definitions necessary for learning, discussion, and developing an empirical legal research, such as: research problem, question, hypothesis, dependent and independent variable, correlation and causation, complementarity and triangulation, etc. These two sessions provide the students with the analytical tools to follow and develop discussions on empirical legal research design and methods.
• The third part of the course reviews and trains the students on the most common empirical legal methods and knowledge for implementing legal research. 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.

This course is part of iCourts Excellence Programme (iEP) – International Law and Courts in a Global World, please see 'Remarks' below.