Non Doctrinal Research
Chapter Eighty-Nine
Syllabus topic 5, "Research Methods"
Pages 326 to 328 of 543
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.
Non Doctrinal Research
People, by interview, questionnaire or schedule: litigants, accused persons, lawyers, officials, students, teachers.
Direct observation of a court, an office, a clinic or a classroom.
And documents that are not legal sources: circulars, forms, notices, prospectuses, minutes. MU's own dissertation circular of 1 July 2026, chapter 120, is a document of exactly this kind, and this book uses it as evidence about what MU requires rather than as a legal source.
Where it fits with doctrinal work
Doctrinal first, almost always. You cannot study the operation of a rule you have not correctly ascertained, and a study measuring compliance with a duty that does not exist is worthless.
Then empirical, to establish operation.
Then doctrinal again, to design the remedy, because the remedy has to fit the existing law.
That is the ordinary shape of a good dissertation, and it is why MU's chapterisation, chapter 1320, runs from an introductory and legal framework chapter through the substance to analysis and then to conclusions and suggestions.
Why there is so little of it in India
It is expensive in time. Fieldwork cannot be done in a library.
It requires permissions. Access to a court's records, a jail, a clinic or an office often needs somebody's consent, and refusal is common.
It requires skills law teaching does not supply. Sampling, instrument design and analysis are not taught in an LL.B., chapter 320.
It is not rewarded. Doctrinal writing is publishable faster.
And the results are uncomfortable. A study establishing that an institution is not doing what it is required to do is not welcomed by that institution.
The consequence, and it is chapter 740's opportunity: the field is largely unmeasured, so a student doing careful empirical work is producing something genuinely new almost by default.
A worked example
A non doctrinal study built on records alone, which needs no permission and no fieldwork budget.
The question. Do the law colleges affiliated to this University examine the four compulsory clinical papers as Schedule II prescribes?
The doctrinal half, done first. What Schedule II prescribes for papers 21 to 24, chapter 500: the exercises, the marks, the viva, the simulation and the practitioner involvement.
The data. The published examination pattern and syllabus for those papers, for a defined set of colleges, taken from the University's own documents and the colleges' own prospectuses.
The instrument. A one page comparison sheet per college: for each paper, what the Schedule requires and what the college publishes.
The finding. A table of colleges against requirements.
And what makes it non doctrinal. The sources are prospectuses and examination notices, which are not legal sources at all, and the question is about behaviour rather than about the content of a rule.
Non Doctrinal Research
Cost: nothing. Permissions: none. Novelty: complete, because nobody has done it.
Quick revision
Non doctrinal research, also called empirical or socio legal, studies the operation and effect of law in society using data from outside the legal materials.
It studies: whether the law is known, whether it is used, how it is administered, what effect it has, why it fails, and what people think of it.
Its data come from: institutional records, which are cheapest and most neglected; official statistics; people, by interview, questionnaire or schedule; direct observation; and non-legal documents.
The order: doctrinal first to ascertain the rule; empirical to establish operation; doctrinal again to design a remedy that fits the law.
Why India has so little: it costs time, needs permissions, needs skills the LL.B. does not teach, is not rewarded, and produces uncomfortable results. Which is why a careful student study is new almost by default.
Test yourself
1. Define non doctrinal research and give its three names. Research that 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 institutional records, and analysing it. It is called non doctrinal by contrast with the legal sources, empirical by its method, and socio legal by its subject.
2. Why must doctrinal work usually come first? Because the operation of a rule cannot be studied until the rule has been correctly ascertained. A study measuring compliance with a duty that does not exist, or that has been amended, establishes nothing.
3. Name the cheapest source of empirical data in this field and give two examples. Institutional records, because somebody has already collected them. Examples are the clinic registers required by regulation 20 of the NALSA (Legal Services Clinics) Regulations 2011, and the published examination patterns of law colleges, which can be compared against what Schedule II of the Rules of Legal Education 2008 prescribes.
4. Give three reasons there is so little empirical legal research in India. It is expensive in time and cannot be done in a library; it often requires permissions from institutions that may refuse; and it needs skills in sampling, instrument design and analysis that the law degree does not teach.
The rest of this subject
These notes are cut from the University's printed syllabus. Open the syllabus itself, or the past papers, for the same subject.