Building Capacity for Building Capacity for

Empirical Legal Research:Empirical Legal Research:

Some questions about the links Some questions about the links

between methods and subjectsbetween methods and subjects

Sharon WitherspoonDeputy Director

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The Nuffield FoundationThe Nuffield Foundation

Founded in 1943

Concerned initially with science and the then new field of academic social sciences

Investment in infrastructure, including human capital

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Nuffield Inquiry into Empirical Nuffield Inquiry into Empirical Research in LawResearch in Law

Foundation’s long-standing interest in law and legal research, from the beginning but particularly from late 1960s

Inquiry started in 2005

Involved – Academics: both academic lawyers and non-lawyers – Policy makers – Strategic practitioners: judges, lawyers, court

managers

Both civil law (administrative law, family law, etc) and criminal law

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Diagnosis and UnderstandingDiagnosis and Understanding

Is there a problem?

Why does it matter?

What are the causes?

What are the solutions?

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What is the problem?What is the problem?

Reducing capacity to undertake empirical research on law (ERL)

Cohort of experienced researchers will retire in next decade

Sparse new generation

Discipline under threat

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What are the causes?What are the causes?

Law in the academy:– Professional training– Legal scholarship / ‘legal reasoning’– Absence of critical mass

Social science – General decline in empirical research?– General decline in quantitative training?– Political science and sociology less ‘institutional’ (than

elsewhere?)– Decline of interest in power and social structural forces

(as against ‘culture’)– Apprehension about technicality of law

General problems:– RAE and its effects on incentives– Inter-disciplinary work (also RAE)

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What are the solutions?What are the solutions?

No quick fix: ‘market failure’

Sustained interventions at various points:

– Undergraduate course materials for law and social sciences

– Summer schools, master’s cross-disciplinary training

– Post-graduate and PhD

CRUCIAL: links between methods and substantive issues

Hence, centres doing substantive research

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Reasons for choosing to link Reasons for choosing to link methods and substance:methods and substance:

Methods innovation linked to exciting intellectual questions

Normative questions of law linked to empirical questions of ‘what is’

Different disciplines attracted– Economics: behaviours and counterfactuals– Psychology: motivations, experiments– Politics and Sociology: linking structures and

individual actions and decisions

Linking cutting edge substantive issues with TRAINING

– Cross-disciplinary (law and social sciences)– Critical mass younger people: Masters, PhDs, Post-

docs

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Model of Legal Education and ScholarshipModel of Legal Education and ScholarshipWhere to break in?Where to break in?

Preponderance of doctrinal legal

research

Undergraduates Taught doctrinal research and limited exposure to

empirical work

Most exit to practice and never return

Senior practitioners and judiciary

PostgraduatesDoctrinal or theoretical work.

No training in empirical methods. Shortage of

supervisors to deal with empirical projects.

Appointment & Mid-careerTeaching core subjects

Continue pattern of doctrinal research