Abstract

The current debate in the Netherlands about the ‘right’ use of methods in the legal discipline is flawed and leads nowhere. It should be recognized that there are multiple forms of legal research, each having different goals and (thus) methods. It is in this perspective of plurality that the debate about the use of methods should be framed. This is helpful for discussions amongst legal scholars, but also to justify the types of legal analyses vis-à-vis other scientific disciplines. The use of ‘systematic case law analysis’ is used as an example of how new methods and techniques of research can infuse traditional doctrinal discussions in the legal domain.

About the Speaker

 Paul Verbruggen is Associate Professor of Private Law at Tilburg Law School. His research concerns (comparative) private law and its interplay with European law and regulation. He Paul wrote his PhD thesis at the EUI in Florence, and was a visiting researcher at LSE, Oxford and Leuven. In 2021 he edited a collection (in Dutch) on the ‘systematic case law analysis’, bringing together scholars from Belgium and the Netherlands to showcase the use of different social-science methods of the study of case law.

Seminar paper

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Practicalities

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