A TYPOLOGY OF RESEARCH OBJECTIVES IN LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP

In the past legal scholarship has been struggling to authorize its position as a scientific discipline. One crucial aspect of this debate involves methodology. An explicit research methodology is essential to sciences, allowing scholars to perform and describe their research in an unambiguous, objective and repeatable manner. Legal scholars evidently use certain research techniques but these generally lack a detailed description and justification. Therefore legal scholarship is lacking an explicit methodological framework. Legal scholars have become increasingly aware of the importance of an explicit methodology and today there is a strong call for in-depth research into methods for legal research. This article aims to answer this call and take a first step towards the creation of an explicit methodological framework for legal scholarship by providing an overview of the different types of research objectives in legal research. This overview is part of a more extensive typology on “Research Objectives and Research Methods for Traditional Legal Scholarship” created within the framework of the author’s PhD project.