The competent study of law is a finely tuned balance of excellent language ability, good reading and writing skills, good personal study discipline, a thorough appreciation of the relevant areas of substantive law and excellent argumentative skills. Legal method is an important area of study for two main reasons. First, it is important for the range of techniques that it can offer to break into legal texts, both primary and secondary. Secondly, it exposes reasoning processes concerned with the theory and practise of law. The book deals in both the areas mentioned, and aims to deal with issues of.
The Palgrave Macmillan Law Masters series is a long-running and successful list of titles offering clear, concise and authoritative guides to the main subject areas, written by experienced and respected authors. This ninth edition of Legal Method provides a lively introduction to the nature of the English legal system and its sources, and to the techniques which lawyers use when handling those sources. The text assumes no prior knowledge and makes its content accessible by clarity of expression rather than by dilution of content. In addition to more conventional sources, writers as varied as Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and T. S. Eliot are cited. This is an ideal course companion for both law undergraduate and GDL/CPE students. Includes end of chapter summaries and self-test exercises.
This updated casebook serves a course in introduction to legal reasoning. It is designed to initiate students in the legal methods of case law analysis and statutory interpretation. In a course of this kind, students should acquire or refine the techniques of close reading, analogizing, distinguishing, positing related fact patterns, and criticizing judicial and legislative exposition and logic. Law students' introduction to law can be unsettling: the sink or swim approach favored by many schools casts students adrift in a sea of substantive rules, forms and methods. By contrast, the Legal Methods course seeks to acquaint students with their new rhetorical and logical surroundings before, or together with, the students' first encounters with the substance of contracts, torts, or other first year courses. This approach may not only be user friendly; it should also prompt students to take a critical distance from the wielding of the methods. In this way, students may avoid (or at least broaden) the tunnel vision that so often afflicts beginning law students. The fifth edition features a substantially revised chapter on statutory interpretation. It not only highlights recent Supreme Court decisions, but also confronts students with statutory texts to construe independently of judicial exposition. The chapter also includes new sections on ordinary meaning, the use of dictionaries and corpus linguistics, and temporal problems in statutory interpretation.
John Law argues that methods don't just describe social realities but are also involved in creating them. The implications of this argument are highly significant. If this is the case, methods are always political, and it raises the question of what kinds of social realities we want to create. Most current methods look for clarity and precision. It is usually said that only poor research produces messy findings, and the idea that things in the world might be fluid, elusive, or multiple is unthinkable. Law's startling argument is that this is wrong and it is time for a new approach. Many realities, he says, are vague and ephemeral. If methods want to know and help to shape the world, then they need to reinvent themselves and their politics to deal with mess. That is the challenge. Nothing less will do.
This book gives an overview of the most relevant disciplines for interdisciplinary research on law. What are the characteristics of these disciplines one really needs to understand in order to do research that combines law with them? The book consists of three parts. The first part addresses general methodological questions about legal scholarship and interdisciplinary research. The second part consists of chapters exploring the relationship between law and other disciplines. The disciplines are classified in broadly three categories: empirical social science, humanities, and language-oriented disciplines. The third part contains examples of interdisciplinary research in practice: how is it done, what kinds of problems arise when doing such research, and what insights into law does it provide?
This book seeks to question the widely held assumption in Europe that to have knowledge of law is simply to have knowledge of rules. There is a knowledge dimension beyond the symbolic which reaches right into the way facts are perceived, constructed and deconstructed. In support of this thesis the book examines, generally, the question of what it is to have knowledge of law; and this examination embraces not just the conceptual foundations, methods, taxonomy and theories used by jurists. It also examines the epistemological schemes used by social scientists in general in order to show that such schemes are closely related to the schemes of intelligibility used by lawyers and judges.
Ginsburg's casebook provides detailed information on legal methods and the tools for fast, easy, on-point research. Part of the University Casebook Series®, it includes selected cases designed to illustrate the development of a body of law on a particular subject. Text and explanatory materials designed for law study accompany the cases.
Awareness of the need to deepen the method and methodology of legal research is only recent. The same is true for comparative law, by nature a more adventurous branch of legal research, which is often something researchers simply do, whenever they look at foreign legal systems to answer one or more of a range of questions about law, whether these questions are doctrinal, economic, sociological, etc. Given the diversity of comparative research projects, the precise contours of the methods employed, or the epistemological issues raised by them, are to a great extent a function of the nature of the research questions asked. As a result, the search for a unique, one-size-fits-all comparative law methodology is unlikely to be fruitful. That however does not make reflection on the method and culture of comparative law meaningless. Mark Van Hoecke has, throughout his career, been interested in many topics, but legal theory, comparative law and methodology of law stand out. Building upon his work, this book brings together a group of leading authors working at the crossroads of these themes: the method and culture of comparative law. With contributions by: Maurice Adams, John Bell, Joxerramon Bengoetxea, Roger Brownsword, Seán Patrick Donlan, Rob van Gestel and Hans Micklitz, Patrick Glenn, Jaap Hage, Dirk Heirbaut, Jaakko Husa, Souichirou Kozuka and Luke Nottage, Martin Löhnig, Susan Millns, Toon Moonen, Francois Ost, Heikki Pihlajamäki, Geoffrey Samuel, Mathias Siems, Jørn Øyrehagen Sunde, Catherine Valcke and Matthew Grellette, Alain Wijffels.
