(6) Methods and approaches to research legal questions in your thesis

Today we look at how the issues we discussed in the previous classes shape legal research in practice, and how you can make use of our insights for your thesis. We will also discuss a number of different…

(7) Legal storytelling

In previous classes we discussed that legislators, judges and administrators always have a discretionary choice in applying the law. This means that a lawyer will not only have to provide a plausible interpretation of the law, but also convince them to exercise this discretion in her…

(4) Dealing with non-legal knowledge in legal discourse

Consider the following example:

A driver veered off the road, and the passenger was killed. The driver is indicted for negligent homicide. The driver claims that the accident was caused because the car…

(2) What is legal research?

In the previous class, we discussed what law is. In this class, we address the question what legal research is.

Research methods

As a homework, students had to identify research methods of various scientific…

(1) What is law?

This is the first of a total of six of texts that accompany my course on Legal Methodology. In the first class, we discuss what law — i.e., the object of legal research — is.

To understand what law is, we need a theory of it

(3) How general law determines the outcomes of individual cases (or not), and what this tells us about legal research

At the end of the previous class, students were confronted with the following statement, and had to decide whether they agree or…

(4.1) Analyzing legal articles

In the previous classes, we discussed legal scholarship from a variety of different perspectives, but we tended to stay on a more abstract level. In the following weeks, we take the opposite route, and analyze legal articles in detail.

(5) Resources for thesis research at the VU

This is a brief collection of resources that are relevant for your thesis.

Avoiding plagiarism

Plagiarism means that you sell somebody else’s work as your own. The general rule for avoiding…