ABSTRACT
Many of the exciting questions that drive early career scholars for their first research project are difficult to answer with just one disciplinary approach. The realities of law are not revealed simply by interpreting a legal norm or analysing a legal text; reversely, understanding the societal relevance of law—as a system of norms, a regulating force or an economic factor—benefits from an understanding of law’s internal logic, the process of law-making and of legal application. With this need to think of law from different standpoints, there is a great interest among doctoral students in both law and social sciences to expand the toolbox of methods they have learned during their mostly mono-disciplinary university education. Despite students’ thirst for methods, learning spaces for interdisciplinary legal research are rare and often ad hoc. And when students auto-didactically try to improve their methodological skill set, they quickly realise that interdisciplinary work means more than reading method books about, for example, the art of interviewing or methods of legal interpretation. Field research skills are learned in the field and legal methods are understood when law is applied to real cases. 3
