Socio-Legal Research: Theory and Methodology

Socio-Legal Research provides a broad view of the methods adopted by various legal researchers and jurists of various schools—from natural school to positivist school, sociological school to critical legal school and postmodernism of recent times. It describes various legal thoughts developed in different sociological backdrops from the Italian Renaissance to French Enlightenment and from Chicago school to Frankfurt school. Socio-Legal Research guides law researchers to understand the hermeneutic approach, historical method, field study method, case study method, feminist legal method and jurimetrics adopted in socio-legal research. M.Phil. and Ph.D. students including Pre-Registration Coursework students will get immense benefit from the study of this book. It will help researchers engaged in action research for various research institutes, government organizations and funding agencies. This book will also be useful for all postgraduate law (LL.M.) and social science students for whom research methodology is a compulsory subject. Socio-Legal Research, in a nutshell, narrates the development in approaches for social science research; classifies all types of social research on the basis of their application, mode, pattern and instrumentality; explains the steps in the formulation of a hypothesis and the formation of theory in socio-legal research; discusses the framing of research design for case law study, focus group study, blind studies and trend studies; analyzes different kinds of probable and non-probable sample collection; illustrates tools and techniques for data collection in empirical studies on socio-legal issues; provides guidance on legal writing for case analysis, legislation interpretation, legal articles, book reviews and research synopses; and introduces a new course “Research and Publication Ethics” (RPE) for an idea on various scientific conducts and publication misconducts as per the latest University Grants Commission syllabus