On method, yet again

Marco Almada

Marco Almada

— 9 min read
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A photo of Madrid's Royal Palace complex, including the Campo de Moro gardens and the Almudena cathedral.
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Hello, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of AI, Law, and Otter Things! I hope you had a lovely summer/winter break. Here, my significant otter and I have spent most of the last few months working out the details of our move to Madrid and settling up in this new town. So far, so good: the city is lovely (and speaks to my big city affections in a way that Luxembourg could not), and I'm enjoying my new work environment at CUNEF University. But now that I'm starting to settle into a routine, I guess it's time to come back to my beloved newsletter.

What do I want to talk about today? Frankly, I still have no clue as I write these words, so this is one of those 'stream of consciousness' issues. First, I will share a brief rant about questions of method in legal research (and law and tech more specifically). Of course, that is followed up by the usual parts of the newsletter: some reading recommendations, job and event opportunities, and the usual cute otters. Hope you enjoy!

Methods will not save us

A distinctive trace of English-language legal scholarship is a certain anxiety towards method.[1] In certain circles — such as my usual communities of EU law and tech law — it is common to refer to dismiss doctrinal legal scholarship as being somehow beneath 'serious' academics. Even if not everybody goes as far as Geoffrey Samuel in viewing it as something akin to astrology, there is an expectation that anybody (especially early-career scholars) must bring something else to the table if they want to be innovative.[2] Given the increasingly competitive academic job markets, this creates a considerable incentive towards legal scholarship borrowing methods from elsewhere.

I am not wholly opposed to this — hell, I am trying to build a career on precisely that development! Even so, my impression is that the obsession towards having methods that are acceptable to others has a very obvious failure mode: paint-by-the-numbers scholarship, in which legal scholars follow formulas devised elsewhere without having much of the conceptual framework needed for understanding that or criticizing what is going on.[3]

This risk might be more evident when it comes to the use of quantitative methods in legal scholarship, as, let's face it, jokes about lawyer numeracy are not wholly ungrounded. But it is not absent when it comes to the use of qualitative methods in legal scholarship, which require a level of reflexity and methodological sophistication that go beyond the limited offers of training in most graduate programs in law. So, if we are going to borrow methods from other disciplines, we need to think carefully about what we are doing.

Fortunately, we have more and more legal reflections about method. To stick with recent examples from law and technology scholarship, Ryan Calo has just published an entire book proposing a 'methodical approach' to law and technology, as did Ronald Leenes, among others. These articles are the tip of the iceberg of a much broader conversation, featuring articles on specific approaches to law and tech, such as recent papers by Margot Kaminski and Meg Leta Jones and Tiffany C Li and broader reflections such as Silvia de Conca's insightful piece on how the 'law of the horse' debate from US legal scholarship has shaped law and tech debates in Europe and led to considerable under-examination of European particularities. These are valuable contributions on how to engage with technology from a legal perspective. Still, most of them build on an assumption that I am quite sceptical of: that the embrace of methodological rigour will legitimize what we do and turn it into 'serious' scholarship.

This is not to say that methodology cannot help us. At the very least, it provides us shared terms of reference to discuss developments and issues across different branches of the law that do not talk among themselves that often.[4] The embrace of techniques that are accepted in other disciplines also make it easier for legal scholars to pursue external funding sources, as applications are often evaluated by peers in social sciences (or, heaven forbid, physicists [5]) that might not be aware of what counts as good legal scholarship. Pressure towards a methodological turn in legal scholarship can also be a way to displace incumbents in legal academia, which, let's face it, is quite prone to ossification. At the end of the day, however, I believe we should (also) evaluate our turn to methodology in light of another question: is it helping us to learn things about the law that we would not learn otherwise?

The answer to this question is potentially "yes". After all, these methods have been useful in other domains of inquiry about social phenomena. Yet, we should be aware of how this renewed emphasis on methods can backfire.

One failure method relates to the opportunity cost of developing these skills: speaking for myself, my education as a computer scientist has surely come in handy in making sense of how to apply the law to digital technologies. However, we only have so much time in life to learn things, and so the time I spent in those studies has certainly come at the expense of depth in legal reasoning. Learning how to do things properly takes time, and if we expect research to be conducted by individuals or small groups, the result is likely to be a loss of depth in inquiry.

A related issue emerges from how we train legal scholars. For all the emphasis on the idea that a PhD in law should not be 'mere' doctrine, doctoral programmes in law tend to be quite thin in providing knowledge about methods. This might be less of a problem in US legal academia, as the postgraduate model of training means that people come from other disciplines (often with PhDs in them), but legal education elsewhere cannot rely on that kind of outsourced training.

Of course, self-learning and unstructured learning are important elements of the doctoral experience. But, without background training, the risk is that we end up producing third-rate sociology (or political science, or computer science, etc.) instead of actually advancing knowledge about law as a social and political phenomenon.[6]

Something else we need to be aware of is that the effectiveness of methods as signs of deep thinking is dependent on a series of background conditions. These conditions have been strained for a while now, as developments such as widespread problems in the replication of scientific results across disciplines, predatory academic journals and conferences, and the onslaught of AI-generated content are all challenging overall trust in academic outputs. Perhaps legal scholarship has a role to play in finding out way out of these crises of scientific knowledge, but legal scholars would do well to look at the challenges facing adjacent disciplines as they try to emulate them.

Once again, my goal is not to say that legal scholarship should be limited to good old-fashioned doctrinal works. It is, instead, to whine about reductionism. If we treat rigour as the product of individual choices --- especially if we delegate those choices to disciplines with different concerns and cultures --- we risk overlooking not only the social factors that make those standards of rigour work (or break down), but the more fundamental question of whether those standards are actually helping us on our goals. In the end, what we probably need is more experimentation with method, but one that keeps an ongoing conversation rather than trying to find a royal road for legal knowledge production.

  1. To be more precise, what is unique about Anglophone scholarship is not the anxiety in itself, but the reaction in trying to emulate methods. In Civil Law cultures, the same anxiety has been traditionally repressed through other claims, such as the preposterous arguments that one can speak of a 'legal science' in the narrower sense of science (as opposed to 'merely' in the broader extension of terms such as the German Wissenschaft). Disciplinary impostor syndrome can take various forms. ↩︎

  2. See, e.g., the inaugural editorial for European Law Open. ↩︎

  3. Richard Feynman popularized the term "cargo cult science" as a shorthand for this kind of mindless following of rituals that are associated with scientific practice. The term is derived from an analogy with the practices of so-called cargo cults in Melanesian cultures, but the original framing of these cultures is nowaday contested by anthropologists as an inadequate analytical tool for understanding the social dynamics at play here. In addition to these problems with its origin, the cargo cult science metaphor has also been criticized as leading to counter-productive ways of engaging with bad practices. So, I decided against continuing my use of the term, and share these notes here as an aside to anybody who is familiar with it. ↩︎

  4. Heck, sometimes it can be easy to find collaborators in other disciplines than to reach across the public/private law divide (or even more narrowly defined fiefdoms within legal scholarship). But that is a topic in which I'm not committing my opinions in writing, given my Bialystock & Bloom levels of moral fortitude. ↩︎

  5. I have nothing against physicists. In fact, some of my best friends are spheric cows rolling on frictionless planes. ↩︎

  6. If you are going to make a claim that quantitative analysis is the future of law, please make sure that you can at least define a p-value properly. ↩︎

Recommendations

The summer's greatest hit was UCL Massively Crossreferenced Digital Laws, in which a team led by Michael Veale compiled a cross-referenced version of some of the key EU and UK digital law instruments, connecting them with relevant case law, implementing acts, and administrative acts at the Member State level. A valuable asset for anyone working on the EU digital acquis.

For those of you who get more hands-on with law and computational methods, Timo Seidl has provided command-line tools for building datasets from EUR-Lex and from the European Commission's Press Corner.

The TAPED team at Lucerne has released a new version of their dataset on Digital Trade Provisions, which covers more than 465 Preferential Trade Agreements concluded since 2000. 

In addition to the sources mentioned above, here are some things that might interest y'all:

Opportunities

Disclaimer: as usual, I am gathering these links purely for convenience and because I think they might be of interest to readers of this newsletter. Unless I explicitly say otherwise, I am not involved with any of the selection processes indicated below.

We are hiring! The Department of Law at CUNEF University invites applications for one or more Assistant Professor tenure-track positions, for a starting date of 1 September 2027. This position is open to applicants working in any domain of the law, but we have particular interest in experts in Public Law, International and/or European Tax Law, International Commercial Law, International Company Law, Banking and Financial Regulation, and Labour law. Applications are open until 15 October.

KU Leuven's early career Research Colloquium on Law and Emerging Technologies invites applications until 20 September, with the colloquium taking place on 11 December.

The Brussels Privacy Hub invites applications for its Research Fellows Programme until 30 September. Excellent opportunity for those working on privacy and data protection all over the world, from a variety of approaches.

The ELFA invites submissions to its yearly doctoral award for thesis on EU law. If you have defended your PhD in this area from 1 October 2025 onwards, make sure to submit your application by 10 October.

LUISS Guido Carli in Rome invites applications for Visiting Professors for the 2027/2028 Academic Year. If you are interested in a visit between 4 and 12 weeks, apply by 23 October.

My former boss at the University of Luxembourg, Niovi Vavoula, is hiring a PhD candidate and a 24-month Postdoc for a project on the legal framework for ethical hacking. Applications are accepted and evaluated on a rolling basis.

Call for papers for the JURIX conference's Doctoral Workshop, with deadline 1 November.

And now, the otter

Hope you found something interesting above, and please consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already:

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