Understanding legal research methods

DOING legal research in an appropriate method is an indispensable research skill of any legal researcher. It does not matter whether you are a law student or a law academic professional; your main target of conducting legal research is to find out the answer of one or more legal questions. A comprehensible and meticulous legal research will show that you have done some good research.

Legal research in Bangladesh is not too old to us, but of course not even too new either. As a law student or a legal academic professional, we know more or less how to do legal research. However, is your research knowledge enough to conduct a quality research paper? Do you think your research paper will convince the targeted readers? Do you think your paper will contribute something new to the society? Recently, these questions have risen by the research team of Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs (BILIA). From their recent experience, they have found out that most of young researchers of Bangladesh are not doing research in appropriate method. The quality and standard of most of the papers are very poor graded and also not publishable. To ensure better understanding of research methods, BILIA has taken an initiative to conduct workshop on research methodology. 

On 9th May, 2015, the workshop on research methodology has been conducted at the auditorium of Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs (BILIA). It was jointly organised by BILIA and School of Law, BRAC University. Dr. Shahdeen Malik who is the honorary Director of BILIA has given an introductory speech and talked about the necessity and importance of research method in legal writing. Later on, Dr. Rizwanul Islam, an Assistant Professor of Law, BRAC University has given the main lecture on legal research method. In his lecture, he discussed about the ethics of a researcher, originality of research, plagiarism, paraphrase, sources of information, footnote/endnote etc. The participants of the workshop have said that it was very resourceful and it will help them to do better research.  

The writer is Legal Research Assistant at Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs (BILIA).