ABSTRACT
The doctrinal approach to teaching and researching law, focused on traditional legal materials and the techniques required to interpret them, constituted the dominant mode of law teaching and research until well into the twentieth century. Evidence of the developing interest in socio-legal studies was reflected in the founding of the Socio-Legal Group of the Society of Legal Scholars (SPTL) in the early 1970s. Socio-legal scholars, especially those conducting empirical research, have been accused of producing research which is not intellectually sophisticated and which is a theoretical and descriptive in nature. For the researcher who is considering conducting some socio-legal research, the choice of method and approach is extensive, as is the range of theoretical work upon which the socio-legal researcher can draw. This chapter introduces two examples of recent socio-legal research to illustrate the variety of work which is gathered together under the umbrella of 'socio-legal research', and to show how research questions, method and theory interact in sociolegal research.
