Research Methods in Law

Dawn Watkins is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Leicester. Her research interests are in law and humanities, legal history, legal education and family law. She teaches on undergraduate courses in Equity and Trusts and Family Law, and has been involved in the design and delivery of training programmes for postgraduate research students. She is also involved in the supervision of PhD students. She was awarded a University teaching fellowship in 2012 and has been short-listed for the Law Teacher of the Year Award 2013. Mandy Burton is a Professor of Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Leicester. Her research interests are in criminal justice, family law and socio -legal studies, with a particular focus on legal responses to domestic violence. She has carried out numerous empirical research projects, many of them commissioned by UK government departments. She teaches criminal law and justice to undergraduates and socio-legal research methods to postgraduate students.

Introduction 1. Doctrinal Research; Researching the Jury, Terry Hutchinson 2. Socio-Legal Studies: A Challenge to the Doctrinal Approach, Fiona Cownie and Anthony Bradney 3. Doing Empirical Research: Exploring the Decision Making of Magistrates and Juries, Mandy Burton 4. Legal Research in the Humanities, Dawn Watkins and Steven Cammiss 5. Legal History, Philip Handler 6. Comparative Law and its Methodology, Geoffrey Samuel 7. Critical Legal `Method’ as Attitude, Panu Minkkinen