Conducting Law and Society Research: Reflections on Methods and Practice

Through interviews with many of the most noteworthy authors in Law and Society, Conducting Law and Society Research takes students and scholars behind the scenes of empirical scholarship, showing the messy reality of research methods. The challenges and the uncertainties, so often missing from research methods textbooks, are revealed in candid detail. These accessible and revealing conversations about the lived reality of classic projects will be a source of encouragement and inspiration to those embarking on empirical research, ranging across the full array of disciplines that contribute to Law and Society. For all of the ambiguities and challenges to the social “scientific” study of law, the reflections found in this book – collectively capturing a portrait of the field through the window of the research efforts – individually remind readers that “good research” displays not an absence of problems, but the care taken in negotiating them.

Simon Halliday has a Ph.D. in Socio-Legal Studies from Strathclyde University. He is author of Judicial Review and Compliance with Administrative Law (2004) and The Appeal of Internal Review: Law, Administrative Justice, and the (Non-)Emergence of Disputes (2003). He is co-editor (with Marc Hertogh) of Judicial Review and Bureaucratic Impact: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2004) and has published articles in journals such as the Journal of Law and Society and the British Journal of Criminology and Public Law. Currently a Professor at the Law School of Strathclyde University and a Conjoint Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales, he was previously the Nicholas de B. Katzenbach Research Fellow at Balliol College and at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford. He is an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Oxford University, and an editorial board member of Law and Policy.

Patrick Schmidt has a Ph.D. in Political Science from The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Lawyers and Regulation: The Political of the Administrative Process (2005) and articles in journals including Law and History Review, Judicature, the Justice System Journal, and Political Research Quarterly. Currently an Associate Professor of Political Science at Macalester College, he has previously held positions as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Southern Methodist University, and as the John Adams Research Fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies and a Junior Research Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford Halliday and Schmidt previously edited Human Rights Brought Home: Socio-Legal Studies of Human Rights in the National Context (2004).