Non Doctrinal Research

In one line

Non doctrinal research goes and finds out what is happening under the law, and it is called non doctrinal because its material comes from outside the legal sources rather than from inside them.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: non doctrinal research, also called empirical or socio legal research, studies the operation and effect of law in society by collecting data from sources outside the legal materials, through observation, interview, questionnaire, schedule, case study, survey and the examination of institutional records, and by analysing that data to establish what is happening, why, and with what consequences; it complements doctrinal research, which can state the rule but cannot say whether it is followed.

The three names, and whether they mean the same thing

Non doctrinal is the name by contrast: not from the doctrine.

Empirical is the name by method: from observation and experience.

Socio legal is the name by subject: the relation between law and society.

They overlap almost entirely and a candidate may use any of them, but a small distinction is worth knowing. Socio legal research always concerns law in its social context; empirical research merely uses data, and a study counting how many judgments cite a particular case is empirical without being socio legal.

What it studies

Whether the law is known. Chapter 640's first failure.

Whether it is used, and by whom.

How it is administered. What officials, judges, clerks and lawyers actually do.

What effect it has. Whether the behaviour the rule aims at has changed.

Why it fails, where it does. The cause rather than the symptom, chapter 740.

And what people think of it, which is a legitimate subject and is the one most easily done badly, because opinion is cheap to collect and hard to interpret.

How it is done

The eight steps of chapter 690, and they are the same steps whether the study is called a legal survey or empirical research: the question; what is already known; the hypothesis and what would test it; the universe and the sample; the instrument; the pre-test; collection; and analysis with limits stated.

Its tools are chapters 960 to 990: observation, interview, questionnaire, schedule, case study and survey.

Its sampling is chapters 1000 to 1020.

And its analysis is chapter 1040.

What this chapter adds is the point of it, which is that all of that machinery exists to answer a question doctrinal method cannot reach.

Its sources of data

Institutional records. The cheapest and most neglected: clinic registers under regulation 20 of the 2011 Regulations, chapter 600; District Authority returns; court registers; college examination records. Somebody has already collected these.

Official statistics and reports.