Research Methodology in Law and Its Application to Women’s Human Rights Law

Abstract

Legal scholars engaged in academic research inevitably encounter various issues related to applicable methodology in the respective area of their legal research. This is partly because academic legal research is a relatively new field of inquiry and those trained in traditional legal research usually choose to ignore writing a methodology for their research paper/thesis.1 This has adversely affected the growth of a “methodology tradition” in the discipline of law. The article begins by defining methodology and briefly explaining some of the barriers underpinning the issues related to methodology in legal research as well as choices available to the legal academics in the said field. It will briefly describe two existing major methodological approaches for legal research, namely the Black-letter approach and socio-legal approaches.2 The article then describes how various research approaches can be applied to human rights law and particularly to the field of women human rights.