Legal research: meaning, objectives and kinds

1. What research is

Research is a systematic, careful and critical search for new knowledge, or for a new understanding of existing knowledge, carried out by a stated method so that others can check it. Three features separate it from ordinary inquiry: it is systematic (it follows a plan that can be described), it is controlled (the researcher tries to rule out explanations other than the one being tested), and it is public (sources and methods are disclosed so that the work can be verified or repeated). Kerlinger, in Foundations of Behavioral Research, describes scientific research in these terms: a systematic, controlled, empirical and critical investigation of propositions about the relations among phenomena. C.R. Kothari’s widely used Indian text treats research as a movement from the known to the unknown by a careful and disciplined method.

The word itself carries the idea of searching again. Research is rarely a first look; it is a second, closer look at material others have already seen, in the hope of finding something they missed.

2. What makes research “legal”

Legal research is research whose object is law: rules, principles, doctrines, institutions, legal processes, and the effect of law on people. It has two sides:

• research in law: finding, analysing and ordering legal materials — statutes, cases, rules, treaties — to state what the law is and how it should be read. This is the traditional doctrinal work of lawyers and judges.
• research about law: studying law as a social fact — how it is made, used, avoided and experienced. Here the lawyer borrows methods from sociology, economics, history and political science.

A practitioner researching a brief and a scholar writing a thesis both do legal research, but their purposes differ. The practitioner seeks the authority that wins the case; the scholar seeks to explain, criticise or reform the law and must deal fairly with authority that goes against the argument.

3. Objectives

• to discover and state the law on a point, especially where it is scattered or uncertain;
• to systematise it — to bring decisions and statutes into a coherent body of principle;
• to explain and evaluate it — to test rules against their purposes and against constitutional values;
• to predict how courts are likely to decide (Holmes’s view of law in “The Path of the Law”, 1897);
• to study the working of law and its social effects;
• to propose reform — the work of the Law Commission of India, of parliamentary committees and of much LL.M. writing.

4. Kinds of research

No single classification is official. Examiners accept any clear scheme, provided the categories are explained and illustrated.

Pure and applied. Pure research seeks understanding for its own sake — a study of the concept of legal personality, for instance. Applied research seeks to solve a practical problem — whether the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 has reduced delay in commercial disputes. The line is not sharp; theoretical work often turns out to have uses.

Descriptive and analytical. Descriptive research states what exists: the provisions of a statute, the facts of a body of cases. Analytical research goes further and asks why and with what consequence: it breaks a rule into its elements, examines the reasoning behind it, tests it for consistency and asks whether it achieves its purpose. Section 5 develops this.

Historical research traces the origin and growth of a rule or institution — the evolution of judicial review, the colonial origins of sedition law. Its sources are old statutes, debates, records and earlier judgments. Its danger is reading present values into the past.

Comparative research studies the law of two or more systems on the same problem. It helps to borrow solutions and to understand one’s own system better. Zweigert and Kötz (An Introduction to Comparative Law) stress functional comparison: compare how systems solve the same social problem, not merely rules bearing the same name. The risk is the legal transplant that fails because the social context differs (Alan Watson’s work on legal transplants).

Policy and law-reform research asks what the law should be, weighs options and recommends one. Its design is treated in the note on research design.

The Pearce typology. The Australian Pearce Committee’s review of legal education (1987) classified legal research into four kinds that are now widely cited: doctrinal (systematic exposition of the rules governing a category, analysing their relationship and explaining difficulties), reform-oriented (evaluating rules and recommending change), theoretical (understanding the conceptual basis of legal principles) and fundamental (research to understand law as a social phenomenon). The scheme is useful in an answer because it shows that doctrinal work is one kind among several, not the whole of legal scholarship.

5. Analytical legal research and its importance

Analytical research is the method most LL.M. dissertations actually use. It works on legal material with the tools of logic: definition, classification, distinction, and testing for consistency. Its main operations are:

1. conceptual analysis — what does “public order” or “manifest arbitrariness” mean, and is it used in the same sense across cases?
2. doctrinal reconciliation — can apparently conflicting decisions be explained by a principle, or does one line have to be rejected?
3. purposive and value analysis — does the rule serve the purpose for which it was made, and is it consistent with constitutional values?
4. critical analysis — exposing gaps, ambiguities and hidden assumptions in the law.

Its importance can be argued on five grounds:

• Clarity. Courts and legislatures use loose terms. Analysis fixes their meaning and so makes the law knowable, which the rule of law requires.
• Coherence. The law is built case by case. Analysis brings the cases into a system, as Bentham and Austin tried to do for English law and as the analytical school of jurisprudence did generally.
• Criticism and reform. A defect cannot be cured until it is identified. Analysis of the reasoning behind a rule is the first step in any reform proposal.
• Training. It develops the skill that the profession and the bench most need: reading a judgment closely and stating its ratio accurately.
• Foundation for empirical work. A field study of how a law works needs a precise statement of what the law requires. Analytical work supplies the yardstick against which field data are measured.

Its limits must also be stated. Pure analysis can become formalism: it may treat law as a closed logical system and ignore how rules work in practice, which was the realist complaint against Langdell’s generation. Good analytical research therefore ends by asking whether its conclusions fit the social facts, and where they do not, it points to the need for empirical study.

6. Qualities of a good researcher

Writers list intellectual honesty, curiosity, patience, objectivity (willingness to accept a result that defeats one’s hypothesis), accuracy in citation, and the discipline to record sources as one goes. In legal research add a feel for the hierarchy of authority: knowing the difference between a ratio and an obiter, a binding precedent and a persuasive one, a provision in force and one repealed. Since 1 July 2024 the BNS, BNSS and BSA have replaced the IPC, CrPC and Evidence Act, and research on criminal law must say which regime it is examining.

How this is examined

Expect “Define legal research and explain its kinds” or “Enumerate the importance of analytical legal research” (August 2024, 16 marks). For the second, define the method, list its operations, give five reasons for its importance and close with its limits and its relation to empirical work. Citing the Pearce typology and naming a comparative-law source lifts an LL.M. answer above the LL.B. standard.