Law, Behaviour and Society: Empirical Legal Research

How can we study why people commit crimes, why wrongful convictions occur, or how small changes in our environment shape behaviour and compliance with rules? This minor introduces students from Law Faculty and all other faculties to the empirical study of law, behaviour and society, using empirical methods from psychology, sociology, and economics. You will explore how legal rules, institutions, and policies operate in practice and how evidence can be used to understand, evaluate, and improve them.

Get introduced to different empirical methods to understand how law, institutions and society interact. Watch the video to learn more.

Empirical research helps us analyse decision-making, policy effectiveness, crime and the impact of legal reforms. In this minor, you will learn how to interpret such research and how to conduct it yourself, using tools from the social and behavioural sciences. Together with your peers from different disciplines you will assess the strengths and limitations of existing research, bring in your own perspectives and propose better ways to analyse key research questions. You will also design your own research project on a topic that interests you personally and develop your research skills that are highly valued in academia, policy making and the private sector.

What Will You Learn?

1. Qualitative Methods: Using interviews, focus groups, and field research to understand how individuals and communities experience law.
2. Experimental Methods: Designing experiments to test how laws, rules, incentives and nudges shape attitudes and behaviour.
3. Observational Data Analysis: Using real datasets to uncover patterns and assess the effects of policy and legal interventions.

Take a look at the video and learn more about this minor.

• Understand the relevance and importance of empirical methods to law and policy.
• Formulate empirical legal research questions.
• Describe which empirical methods are available to answer these questions.
• Understand the different empirical-legal methods
• Identify the strengths and weaknesses of these methods.
• Critically evaluate empirical findings.
• Understand how empirical methods can be applied in legal practice.
• Pinpoint how policy makers today apply empirical research in policy making at the national and international level.
• Design your own empirical-legal study.

• Course language: English.
• Suitable for law students and social sciences students.
• No prior knowledge in law, methodology or statistics is required.
• Aside from lectures, this course will include group work and class presentations to deepen the understanding of what empirical legal methods are and how they can be applied.
• Students will have an opportunity to meet experts from public institutions and learn how they apply empirical methods to policy-making.
• Open for students who attended the Empirical Legal Studies course in Bachelor 1, but also those without any prior experience.
• Suitable for part time students.
• Taught fully on campus, but we will try to accommodate the needs of part time students.
• Lecture attendance is not mandatory but highly recommended. Participation in working group sessions, individual project presentations, as well as the guest lecture is mandatory.

Teaching methods
• Interactive lectures - bring the knowledge to the students.
• Guest lectures by policy makers – understanding the practical usefulness of the field/method.
• Working group sessions with feedback from the lecturers
• Individual presentations and peer feedback – apply independently the research skills; develop own ideas; develop presentation skills; develop critical thinking.
• Self study – reading materials to prepare for classes and meetings.

Teaching materials
• Presentation slides
• Academic literature (textbooks and articles)

Method of examination
The method of examination in this minor will consists of 2 parts, in order to give due weight to all the elements of the course.
• 1 Individual project of your own research design
• 1 Final exam.

Composition final grade
The final grade consists of 2 parts:
• Individual project: 40%.
• Final exam: 60%.
To pass the course, the total grade should not be below 5.5.