Legal Research and the Social Sciences

Abstract

Policy prescription is thus often encountered in legal scholarship, sometimes addressed to the courts, sometimes to policy makers in government. In Britain, however, neoclassical economics is almost entirely absent from academic legal study, except in such sub-disciplines as competition law, and to a lesser extent labour law, company law and regulation. If people are irrationally attracted to endowments, or irrationally influenced by the way choices are presented, then this has important implications for legal decision-making. Themes drawn from Critical Legal Studies have influenced several British socio-legal scholars. But Critical Legal Studies has also become more sophisticated. The approach to law in doctrinal legal scholarship is also changing in ways that allow for increased multi-disciplinary work. Legal research is impliedly missing the point, reifying the legal at the expense of the real determinants of the social. Legal research has engaged with the more social sciences in ways that would have seemed unlikely even 50 years ago.

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