Understanding Legal Research and Scholarship

Meaning of 'Legal Research'

• It is one of the aspects of studying human behavior, interactions, and attitudes related to law under research studies.
• According to Salmond, law comprises principles recognized and applied by the State in administering justice.
• Law includes fundamental law, statutes, and rules that guide human behavior, covering customs and usages, which are followed over a long time and enforced by the State.
• Enforceability is key to law.
• The main features of law are justice, continuity, uniformity, definiteness, certainty, knowledge, permanence, stability, security, and impartiality.
• B.A. Wartley notes if laws and social control were perfect and automatic, legal scholarship is unnecessary, but laws are imperfect and require amendments and interpretations.

Legal Scholar Activities

• George Braden states legal scholars use words based on other scholars' words and can:
• Write historical essays on the development of law or a particular doctrine.
• Analyze a doctrine, matching and reconciling judicial statements.
• Do a reporter's job by summarizing recent decisions and predicting court decisions.
• Write about personal beliefs, connected to deploring a trend, relying on observations and original thought, not law libraries.
• Write about the relationship between law and the world using field research.
• Legal research studies the relationship between law and the world, focusing on how law governs and the real world, with the process making the real world more remote.
• Legal research systematically investigates legal problems, involving Codes, Acts, and Constitutions with judges, lawyers, Law Commissions, and researchers constantly doing research.
• Makes systematic research into social, political and other fact conditions which give rise to the individual rules.
• Justice Chinnapa Reddy presented research into tax avoidance in a case of Mc Dowell and Co. Ltd. v. Commercial Tax Officer, with the research area related to pure law or law in relation to society.
• Legal researchers study social, political, and economic conditions giving rise to individual rules, acts, or codes, as well as their socio-legal and other effects.
• "Fact Research in Law" seeks to improve the understanding of legal problems, institutions, doctrines, philosophy, history, and the comparative study of law.

Nature and Scope of Legal Research

• It is a search for authority to verify some hypothesis and is a continuum with issues relating to pure law or law in relation to society.
• It identifies and retrieves information needed for legal judgments, starting from analyzing facts to communicating investigation results.
• Differs from other scientific research in its nature of issues and subject matter.
• Requires varying research methods and can be performed by anyone needing legal information.

Legal Research Methodology Knowledge

• Legal research leads to progress in various fields of life.
• It deals with social and behavioral phenomena, studying human behavior, feelings, and attitude.
• It discovers facts and verifies those already known.
• It connects various human activities and gives solutions to legal problems.

The Science of Legal Research Chart

• Involves steps for: choosing a topic, identifying facts and legal issues, finding background information, determining keywords, defining keyword search, searching legal resources, locating relevant material, evaluating resources, organizing material, completing citations, and completing assessment.

Model Analysis

• Legal research analyzes rules and concepts of the legal system, relates to pure law, with inquiry requiring authorities to verify hypothesis.
• 4 Main Models:
  • Evolutive model: explains how legal facts evolve.
    • Examines the evolution of a legal fact, identifying supportive events responsible for its growth, taking the legal researcher to study mutual dependence of law and other societal events and phenomena.
  • Explicative model: explains the nature and scope of law.
    • Ascertains the nature, scope, and source of law to explain what law is and to spell out the features of the legal system.
  • Identificatory model: identifies for whom a legal fact exists.
    • Ascertains for whom a legal fact is made, seeking to identify the parties expected to benefit from a given rule, assesses the utility of a legal fact.
  • Impact Analysis: Impact analysis of a provision.
    • Analyzes the impact of an established or newly conceived legal provision, studying its effect on society, helps assess its success, locate bottlenecks, and revise the provision.

Implementation of Labor Laws

• A study of their implementation in factories demonstrates Impact Analysis.
• A study to predict the public opinion and reactions to a proposed increase in the income tax limit before its legislation demonstrates Projective and Predictive.
• Interactive model: studies the interaction between law and relevant forces.
• Concerned with: (i) the relative autonomy of law vis-a-vis the other components of society; (ii) the relationship between various components within the legal system; and (iii) the independence of one or more components of law within the legal system.
• Successfully used to explain the success or failure of laws and provide extra resources to ensure success.
• Interpretative Model: used to interpret a formal legal fact combining researcher's logic with authoritative opinions.
  • The study of the effects of POTA on Human Rights is an example.
• Collative Model Used to collect legal facts pertaining to a given situation
  • Includes preparing a digest of provisions, decisions, and customary law and reliable/classified legal info.

Factors to Legal Research

• Motivating factors of legal research include curiosity, desire to understand legal problems, appearance of novel situations, desire to verify old laws, and desire to discover new scientific procedures.

Legal Research Assumptions

• The legal research is based upon certain assumptions which may be classified as below:
• Cause.
• Sequence.
• Detachment.
• Ideal types.
• A representative sample.

Objects of Legal Research

• May be classified into academic and utilitarian objects.
• Academic research aims to acquire knowledge for understanding society and laws, while utilitarian research aims to improve social life and control social behavior.

Utility in Society

• Human society suffers from a number of social evils like murders, rapes, suicides, thefts, robberies, quarrels and trespass and research has been proven to show what creates a criminal
• They suggest survey may reveal the causes for growing delinquency among the school children are mismanagement of schools, ill-treatment by the teachers or guardians or bad company. Administrative reforms may be undertaken and prevalence of delinquency may be reduced Explore fundamental traits of human nature so that an attempt may be made to destroy these evils.
• gaining familiarity with legal phenomena, discovering new facts, testing and verifying old facts, analyzing facts into a new framework, analyzing consequences of new facts, developing new research tools and concepts, evaluating law historically, explaining nature and scope of law, and disguising or clarifying old legal aspects.

Objective Observation

• According to Green, "Objectivity is the willingness and ability to examine evidence dispassionately."
• Robert Bierstedt states, "Objectivity means that the conclusions arrived at as the result of inquiry and investigation are independent of the race, color, creed, occupation, nationality, religion, moral preference, and political predisposition of the investigator."
• One should be aware of personal influence that comes from:
  • Selfishness
  • Over-ambition
  • Caste and community -Language

Ethical Neutral

• The researcher should refrain to take sides on moral issues.

Researchers Conduct and Bias

• Problems in research that can cause non-objective views include the following:
• Lack of appropriate research practices
• Value assumption
• A belief that can affect the researcher thoughts One must value scientific reasoning above their own biases

Science Studies and Values

• Some research has a hard time finding solid data and that must be verifiable

Fact and Data

• Facts are the building blocks of knowledge but those facts need to be assessed.
  • In Legal research these can be classified as reliable or unreliable resources

Understanding in the Universe

• People interpret data under the lens that they are familiar with. It is hard to get people to view data and information the same way.

Secondary, Primary, and Legal Research

• Secondary and primary resources and the construction of legal research. As well as the validity of ones sources

Legal Evaluation of Law

• Legal research shows what is right from wrong and as well shows what we should value.

Beliefs in Research

Belief can cause issue with the process of research. One must not assume.

Research Standards

• Must have ethical standards in the process of performing said research

Legal Goals

• Must have a scholarly objective and analyze everything to the best of ones abilities

Ethics and Morals

• There must be a moral component, honesty should also be a top priority

The Researchers Aim

• The best way to get a study with a honest objective and remove you from the research.

Legal Plans

• Have a Strategy to performing legal reach

To Get Results

• The basic legal research strategy for each issue has five overlapping
  • Selection
  • Search

Steps to Take In Account With Every Search

• 1 - To review every case applicable
• 2 - Cases are more important
• 3 - To start broader with your search terms
• 4 - If information is not sufficient must got to 2ndary authority

5 key points

• A basic legal research procedure is to find the law, read the law, review the law, and stop the search

Other Actions

• Use multiple ways to find more info. If something seems as if it will become complex find your answer right away.

3 important keys.

• Understand whats appropriate
• Review it and sort it
• The need for reliable facts

Strategy

• More than making an objective, its also have to have good people skills for investigation

In General

• A good researcher must find facts, analyze facts and come up with the terms and they need to know and they most construct their own goal