What a Legal Survey Is

In one line

A legal survey is an organised attempt to find out what is actually happening under a law, as against what the law says should happen, and it is the only way anybody can know whether a rule is working.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: a legal survey is a systematic empirical investigation into the operation of a law, a legal institution or a legal problem in a defined population or area, conducted by collecting data through observation, interview, questionnaire, schedule, case study or the examination of records, and analysing it to establish the gap between the law as enacted and the law as it operates; it is the method by which law reform proposals are given an evidential basis, and it is the point at which the study of legal education and legal aid becomes the research methodology of Modules III and IV.

The idea in one comparison

Doctrinal work asks what the law is. It reads the Act, the rules and the judgments, and states the position. Chapter 840.

A legal survey asks what is happening. It goes and looks.

And the difference is not academic. Take section 12 of the Legal Services Authorities Act, chapter 570. Doctrinally, every woman in India who has to file or defend a case is entitled to free legal services, and that statement is complete and correct. A legal survey asks how many women in one district applied last year, and the answer is a different kind of fact.

The gap between the two is the subject matter of law reform. A rule that is perfect on paper and unused in practice needs something other than redrafting, and only a survey can show which.

Why this belongs in a topic about clinical legal education

Because the clinic is where the data is. Regulation 20 of the 2011 Regulations requires a clinic to maintain records and registers, chapter 600. A year of entries recording who came, with what problem, and what was done, is a survey that has already been conducted; all that is missing is somebody to read it.

Because the student is the surveyor. Chapter 670: the questions asked at a camp, written down, are data. Nobody else is collecting them.

And because the two halves of MU's topic are one process. Legal aid delivers; the clinic records; the record is a survey; the survey supports reform. That is the sequence chapter 460 set out and this chapter is its middle.

What a legal survey can establish

Whether people know about a right. The most common finding and the most useful, chapter 640.

Whether they use it. Knowing and using are different, and the gap between them is usually about cost, distance, time or fear.