The Role of Empirical Legal Research in the Study of UK Public Law

One of the challenges of writing about the integration of socio-legal studies into the teaching of the law curriculum is that, as a number of commentators have noted, the definition of ‘socio-legal’ can be quite hard to pin down (e.g. Harris, 1983; Galligan, 1996; Cotterrell, 2006). The history of socio-legal studies in the UK, perhaps because of its predominant development within the law schools (Thomas, 1997), is best understood as a reaction against the approach to the study of law which had dominated legal scholarship up to the 1960s. In this sense, the socio-legal movement in the UK has a clearer negative identity than a positive one: it is easier to identify what socio-legal is not, rather than what it is. The broad range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives which can now be accommodated under the banner ‘socio-legal’ testifies to this. The strapline of the Socio-Legal Studies Association, for example (‘where law meets the social sciences and humanities’), is notably inclusive. And the approach to law against which socio-legal’ defines itself is narrow doctrinal analysis: the exposition of positive law, isolated from its economic, political and cultural contexts. Cotterrell, for example, reflecting on his own experiences, locates the attraction of a socio-legal approach in: a set of new perspectives on law to allow a breakout from the claustrophobic world of legal scholarship and education, as previously encountered. Most legal study . . .