Progress in Legal Methodology – A Methodological Assessment of Six PhD Theses

In this article, the question is raised to what extent the methodology debate in legal scholarship has improved the practice by PhD researchers of justifying their methodology. Over the past twenty years, there has been much more consideration and discussion of legal methods, especially in Dutch academia. Taking this Dutch debate as a starting point, Taekema and Van Klink argue that it has led to a normative framework with which the methodology of legal research can be assessed. Formulating a set of topics and questions that form the core of this framework, they apply it to a set of six fairly recent PhD dissertations. Building on these cases, they observe that some progress is made from a methodological point of view, compared with the situation described by Tijssen in his PhD thesis from 2006. Taekema and Van Klink conclude, however, that the methodology debate appears not to have led to a significantly better practice of methodological justification, at least not yet on all assessment criteria. The normative framework of a dissertation, for instance, still deserves attention

Limits and Possibilities of Interdisciplinary Research into Law

Intro: To a growing extent, legal scholars seem to be dissatisfied with established disciplinary boundaries and turn to other disciplines, such as sociology (Cotterrell 2006), psychology (Wagenaar, Van Koppen & Crombag 1993), philosophy (Alexy 2003), economics (Posner 2007) and even literature studies (White 1985), for inspiration. In law faculties all over the world multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research groups are operative, such as the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at the University of California, Berkeley, or the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University. In the hope of increasing their chances to acquire a grant, applicants nowadays try to cut a dash with promises of combining insights from many different sources (Vick 2004, 171). One may wonder who will undertake the important but time-consuming task of analysing and classifying the existing body of legal norms in the future, when legal scholars are getting more and more reluctant to do so. However exciting these new research directions may appear, a fundamental question which deserves more attention is: What are the limits and possibilities of interdisciplinary research into law? Can concepts and methods from one discipline directly be transplanted into another discipline? What is lost and what is gained when insights from different origins are combined? In this article, we want to explore what might make interdisciplinary research possible, on the one hand, and what makes it difficult or even impossible, on the other hand

The utopia of Rojava: A new world for stateless people

This article investigates how participatory art can contribute to legal change. As a case study, it discusses Jonas Staal’s project of New World Summit in Rojava, a (so far still) autonomous region in North and East Syria. It offers an interesting case, since it invites the law to include what it has excluded so far. To begin with, it is clarified how change is conceived within legal systems based on the rule of law. Although law resists radical change, it is involved in a constant process of adaptation to its environment. Subsequently, Staal’s project of New World Summit is discussed from a utopian perspective. Its apparent impossibility is what makes it so valuable for law and its development. By erecting a parliament for Rojava, it presents a picture of how the international order could look like when things were different. As such, it is an exercise in “utopian world-making”