Traditional Legal Methodology: What If You Have Never Seen an Elephant Before? (Blog Post)

Abstract

According to conventional wisdom among legal scholars, legal methodology is so obvious that it does not need to be discussed. Methodology sections of books and journal articles refer to the infamous elephant path, as the route that everyone else before us has taken, suggesting that it would be stating the obvious if the author were to describe their research methods with anything more than ‘traditional legal research’ or ‘desk research’.

But can you still recognise the elephant path, if you’ve never seen an elephant before? Although it may be obvious to legal scholars, to the untrained eye there often seems to be a lack of any methodology, which disqualifies the academic value of the legal discipline compared to other social sciences and has significant consequences with respect to the allocation of funds.

Keywords: Methods, Methodology, Law, Social Sciences