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Legal studies is the academic study of law — its rules, the institutions that make and apply them, the reasoning used to interpret them, and their effects on people and societies. Legal research is the work of finding, reading and analysing legal authority (statutes, regulations, court decisions and the scholarship about them) and, in the scholarly sense, producing new knowledge about law itself. The label covers several different intellectual traditions that share a subject matter but not always a method, which is why the same word can describe a law professor parsing a statute, a sociologist surveying how people experience courts, and a historian tracing how a legal doctrine formed.
Educational overview only. This page is not legal advice, does not create any attorney-client relationship, and cannot tell you what the law requires in your situation. Laws differ by jurisdiction and change over time; consult a qualified attorney or your institution’s counsel for a specific question.
What legal studies actually covers
Three terms are often used loosely, so it helps to separate them. Law is the body of enforceable rules and institutions itself. Legal practice is the professional application of law to clients’ problems. Legal studies (also called legal scholarship, and in a broad sense jurisprudence) is the academic inquiry into law as an object of study. The three overlap constantly, but a research question in legal studies is usually about how law works, why it takes the form it does, or what it does to the world, rather than about what to advise one client.
The field is notable for how much of it is interpretive. Many questions are not answered by collecting data but by reading authority carefully, reconstructing the reasoning behind it, and arguing for the best reading. Other branches look and behave like the social sciences. Knowing which kind of question you are asking is the first step in choosing a method.
The main research traditions
Doctrinal research
Doctrinal (or “black-letter”) research asks what the law is on a point. It analyses primary authority — constitutions, statutes, regulations and judicial decisions — and secondary sources that explain them, then synthesises the rules and tests them against hard cases. It is the traditional core of legal scholarship and of legal education, and its outputs are typically arguments: that a rule is best understood in a particular way, that two lines of authority conflict, or that a rule should change.
Empirical legal studies
Empirical legal research applies quantitative and qualitative social-science methods to legal questions: how judges decide, how long cases take, how legal rules change behaviour, whether a policy produced its intended effect. It borrows designs, sampling logic and statistics from economics, political science and psychology. If you work in this area, the same issues of measurement, validity and reproducibility that appear elsewhere on this site apply directly.
Socio-legal studies and law and society
Socio-legal research examines law as a social phenomenon: how legal institutions operate in practice, how people experience and understand rights, and how law interacts with inequality, culture and power. It often contrasts “law on the books” with “law in action.” It draws on sociology, anthropology, political science and criminology, and it is where legal studies meets the other social sciences most directly.
Comparative law
Comparative law studies how different legal systems solve similar problems. It might compare how two countries regulate a technology, how common-law and civil-law systems approach contracts, or how a legal transplant fares in a new setting. Good comparative work attends to context: the same rule can function very differently where courts, bureaucracies and cultural expectations differ.
Legal history
Legal history traces how legal doctrines, institutions and professions developed and why. It treats law as the product of particular political, economic and intellectual circumstances rather than as timeless logic, and it often informs present debates by showing that current arrangements were contingent.
Jurisprudence and legal theory
Jurisprudence is the philosophy of law. It asks what law is, what distinguishes a legal rule from other social rules, how courts should interpret texts, and what makes law legitimate or just. Competing schools — natural law, legal positivism, legal realism, critical approaches and law-and-economics among them — disagree about these foundations, and those disagreements shape how scholars frame everything else in the field.
How legal research is done: sources in general terms
Legal researchers sort sources by their authority. Primary authority is law itself: constitutions, statutes and codes, administrative regulations, and court opinions. Secondary sources explain, analyse or organise primary law: treatises, restatements, encyclopaedias, practice guides and journal articles. Finding tools help locate and validate both, including citators that show whether a decision has been followed, limited or overruled. Checking that authority is still “good law” is a habit particular to legal work, because a statute can be amended or a decision superseded after the text you are reading was written.
Three practical points apply across jurisdictions. First, hierarchy matters: a higher court’s decision or a constitutional rule generally controls a lower or ordinary one, and what is binding in one jurisdiction may be merely persuasive in another. Second, currency matters: always confirm the version of a statute or regulation in force on the date relevant to your question. Third, access varies: many governments publish primary law free of charge, while commercial databases and university law libraries provide scholarly commentary and citators. Law librarians are an underused resource and can usually explain the research tools available for a given jurisdiction.
Scholarly norms: law reviews, citation and working papers
Legal scholarship has publishing conventions that differ from most of science and social science. Many leading journals are law reviews edited by students at law schools, rather than journals edited by faculty and run on conventional external peer review. Peer-reviewed journals exist and are important, particularly in empirical and interdisciplinary work, but the student-edited law review remains central to the field’s prestige economy. Law-review articles are also typically long and heavily footnoted compared with a scientific paper, and single authorship remains common; see Law Review and Legal-Scholarship Authorship Norms for why.
Citation follows its own style guides. In the United States the dominant system is The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, compiled by student editors of several leading law reviews (Harvard, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale), and widely used in law reviews and courts. Other jurisdictions use their own systems, so always check the style required by the venue you are writing for.
Scholars commonly share drafts before publication through repositories such as SSRN, which hosts a large legal-scholarship collection alongside other social science fields. See SSRN: How It Works for Researchers and arXiv vs. SSRN for how preprint posting works and which fields use which service. Posting a working paper before submission is routine in law, but always check a target journal’s policy on prior posting.
Professional societies and scholarly communities
The Law and Society Association (LSA) describes itself as an interdisciplinary scholarly organisation committed to social-scientific, interpretive and historical analyses of law across multiple social contexts. It publishes the Law & Society Review and holds an annual meeting where socio-legal scholars from many disciplines gather. Other communities include national and regional associations of law teachers, subject-specific societies (for example in criminology, international law, legal history and empirical legal studies), and research networks organised around particular regions or themes. Their meetings, newsletters and journals are the best way to learn a subfield’s live debates.
Training and career pathways
Routes into the field vary by country. In the United States the professional law degree (the Juris Doctor) is a graduate-level qualification that prepares students for legal practice and bar admission, while research-oriented degrees (such as a master of laws or a doctorate in law) and social-science PhDs prepare people for academic careers. Many legal scholars hold both a professional law degree and a research degree, particularly in empirical and socio-legal work, where methods training from a social science is often expected. Elsewhere, undergraduate law degrees are common and lead into professional training through separate stages. Outside academia, legal-studies graduates work in courts, government, compliance, policy, advocacy, journalism, and, relevant to this site, in university research administration and technology transfer. Entry requirements and regulated titles depend on the jurisdiction, so check with the relevant professional or regulatory body.
Funding for legal research
Funding for legal scholarship is thinner and more varied than in laboratory science. Much doctrinal work is supported by faculty salaries, summer research stipends from law schools and sabbaticals rather than external grants. External funding is more common for empirical and socio-legal projects. In the United States, the National Science Foundation’s Law & Science programme states that it funds “social scientific studies of the connections between law and law-like systems of rules, law and human behavior, as well as studies of how science and technology are applied in legal contexts.” Federal programmes are periodically restructured, renamed or paused, so check the funder’s current solicitation page rather than relying on a description here. Other sources include private foundations, national research councils in other countries, and funders of adjacent social-science fields; see the sibling guides on political science and criminology for funding landscapes that overlap with socio-legal research.
How law connects to research compliance
Legal studies is a scholarly field, but law is also the backbone of research administration. Many of the topics covered elsewhere on CASRAI are, at root, applications of legal rules to research. This section points to them; it describes how the topics fit together and is not a statement of what any law requires of you.
- Human-subjects regulation. The federal regulations governing research with people are explained in Common Rule (45 CFR 46) and 45 CFR 46 and the Common Rule: What Each Subpart Covers.
- Intellectual property and technology transfer. Who owns inventions made with federal funding is the subject of the Bayh-Dole Act and its implementing rules in 37 CFR 401; institutional rules are covered under University Intellectual Property Policy.
- Export controls. Rules restricting transfers of certain technology and information are introduced in The Four Pillars of Export Control Compliance and Export Control Classification.
- Research contracts. Agreements that govern sharing materials, data and funds are compared in Material Transfer Agreements & Research Contracting.
A useful habit from legal research carries straight into compliance work: identify the controlling source, confirm that it is current, and distinguish binding rules from guidance or institutional policy. Questions about how a rule applies to a specific project belong with your institution’s counsel or compliance office.
Frequently asked questions
What is legal studies in simple terms?
It is the academic study of law: what legal rules say, how legal institutions work, how law is reasoned about, and what effects law has on society. It is related to, but distinct from, practising law.
Is legal studies the same as studying to become a lawyer?
No. Professional legal education prepares people to practise and, where required, to qualify for admission to the profession. Legal studies as a research field asks scholarly questions about law, and many of its methods come from the humanities and social sciences. Some people do both.
What is the difference between doctrinal and empirical legal research?
Doctrinal research analyses legal authority to determine and argue for what the law is. Empirical legal research collects and analyses data to learn how law operates in practice. They answer different kinds of questions and are often combined.
What does jurisprudence mean?
In its academic sense, jurisprudence is the philosophy or theory of law. In some contexts, especially in some jurisdictions, “jurisprudence” also refers to the body of court decisions on a topic; the meaning depends on the setting.
Why are law reviews student-edited?
It is a long-standing feature of legal academia, particularly in the United States, that many leading law reviews are run by law students who select and edit articles. Peer-reviewed alternatives exist and are common in empirical and interdisciplinary work.
Where can I read the law itself?
Many governments publish constitutions, statutes, regulations and court decisions online, and university law libraries provide guides and databases. Always confirm the version in force for the date that matters to you, and consult counsel for application to a real situation.
Does legal studies connect to research administration?
Yes. Compliance, intellectual property, export controls and research contracting all apply legal rules to research activity. Understanding how legal sources are structured helps administrators read regulations and agreements accurately.
