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17 Deakin L. Rev. 83 (2012)
Defining and Describing What We Do: Doctrinal Legal Research

handle is hein.journals/deakin17 and id is 91 raw text is: DEFINING AND DESCRIBING WHAT WE Do: DOCTRINAL LEGAL RESEARCH TERRY HUTCHINSON* NIGEL DUNCAN The practitioner lawyer of the past had little need to reflect on process. The doctrinal research methodology developed intuitively within the common law - a research method at the core of practice. There was no need to justify or classify it within a broader research framework. Modern academic lawyers are facing a different situation. At a time when competition for limited research funds is becoming more intense, and in which interdisciplinary work is highly valued and non-lawyers are involved in the assessment of grant applications, lawyer-applicants who engage in doctrinal research need to be able to explain their methodology more clearly. Doctrinal scholars need to be more open and articulate about their methods. These methods may be different in different contexts. This paper examines the doctrinal method used in legal research and its place in recent research dialogue. Some commentators are of the view that the doctrinal method is simply scholarship rather than a separate research methodology. Richard Posner even suggests that law is 'not a field with a distinct methodology, but an amalgam of applied logic, rhetoric, economics and familiarity with a specialized vocabulary and a particular body of texts, practices, and institutions ... '.1 Therefore, academic lawyers are beginning to realise that the doctrinal research methodology needs clarification for those outside the legal profession and that a discussion about the standing and place of doctrinal research compared to other methodologies is required. * Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Email correspondence: t.hutchinson@qut.edu.au. Professor of Legal Education, City University London, London, United Kingdom. Email correspondence: N.J.Duncan@city.ac.uk. Felicity Deane is the research assistant on this project. We would like to thank those who commented on early drafts of the paper especially Nigel Stobbs, QUT Faculty of Law. Richard Posner, 'Conventionalism: The Key to Law as an Autonomous Discipline' (1988) 38 University of Toronto Law Journal 333, 345, quoted in Richard Schwartz, 'Internal and External Method in the Study of Law' (1992) 11(3) Law and Philosophy 179, 185.

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