Canadian Legal Research Manual

Quantitative methods dominate in empirical legal research, but an important segment of the field draws on qualitative methods, such as semi-structured interviews and observation. In this book both methodologies are explored alongside systematic data analysis.

Provides a basic introduction to concepts of probability and statistics specifically for lawyers.

Through interviews with many of the most noteworthy authors in law and society, this text takes students and scholars behind the scenes of empirical scholarship, showing the messy reality of research methods.

This text describes how to investigate the roles of legislation, regulation, legal policies and other legal arrangements at play in society. It is invaluable as a guide to legal scholars, practitioners and students on how to do empirical legal research, covering history, methods, evidence, growth of knowledge and links with normativity.

Empirical legal research is a growing field of academic expertise, yet lawyers are not always familiar with the possibilities and limitations of the available methods. This text presents readers with first-hand experiences of empirical research on law and legal issues.

Written for those with little or no background in statistics, this text uses common statistical tools to analyze crime data. It includes both SPSS and Excel criminal justice data sets to complete end-of-chapter exercises and analyses.