This chapter is an attempt to provide a basic understanding to law researchers of doctrinal legal research. The chapter is drafted in such a manner that it will give a systematic approach to acquainted with the doctrinal legal research. It includes the brief historical background, purpose, and steps to conduct doctrinal legal research, tools that are used, advantages and limitations, and summing up with a conclusion. The author has tried his best effort to give all the relevant tools, however, there were limitations due to the huge expansion of information and technology, e.g. social media. These limitations restrain the author to stick to more traditional tools of research.
Top2. Background
The doctrinal legal research is like the Roman God Janus who has two faces one looking into the past and another in the future, doctrinal research has strong roots in the past, but now transitioning towards a digitalised single world (Hutchinson, 2015, p. 136). In the 1980s doctrinal legal research was the predominant form of research used for the assessments of law. The Australian Pearce Committee 1987 highlighted doctrinal legal research as the category in its research taxonomy ((Hutchinson, 2015, p. 131)
In 1987 The Australian Pearce Committee defined doctrinal legal research as “research that provides a systematic exposition of the rules governing a particular legal category, analyses the relationship between rules, explains areas of difficulty and, perhaps, predicts future developments” (Pearce, Campbell & Harding, 1987, p. 312). The definition was further expanded by The Council of Australian Law Deans stating, “Doctrinal research, at its best, involves rigorous analysis and creative synthesis, the making of connections between seemingly disparate doctrinal strands, and the challenge of extracting general principles from an inchoate mass of primary materials” (Council of Australian Law Deans, 2005, p. 3).
The Dean of Harvard Law School Martha Minow stated that doctrinal restatement is one of the essential contributors that legal researchers make to their research (Minow, 2013, p. 65). From the civil law countries' perspective, Rob van Gestel and H.-W. Micklitz defined doctrinal legal research as, “arguments are derived from authoritative sources, such as existing rules, principles, precedents, and scholarly publications” (Gestel & Micklitz, 2011, p. 26).