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Advanced (Legal) Research Methodology (Llaw 6022) CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by HKU Scholars Hub The 'new contribution to knowledge' :a guide for research Title postgraduate students of law Author(s) Morris, RJ Citation Issued Date 2011 URL http://hdl.handle.net/10722/134610 Rights Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License THE “NEW CONTRIBUTION TO KNOWLEDGE” A Guide for Research Postgraduate Students of Law by Robert J. Morris (司徒毅), JD, PhD June 2011 THE “NEW CONTRIBUTION TO KNOWLEDGE” A Guide for Research Postgraduate Students of Law by Robert J. Morris (司徒毅), JD, PhD1 (Copyright 2011 by Robert J. Morris) June 2011 ABSTRACT As law schools and their students integrate with the global realm of both law and non-law research postgraduate (RPG) scholarship, and as RPG scholars in other disciplines, schools, and departments increasingly incorporate legal studies in their research projects, they encounter the demands, norms, and expectations of that global realm. Among these is the requirement that the RPG candidate make a “new contribution to knowledge” by identifying and filling an important “gap” in the existing scholarship. This is variously referred to as “adding value,” being “innovative,” and as being “original” and “novel,” and this requirement applies whether the researcher works in traditional black-letter law or in one of the many other methods of legal research. While these ideas are understood, defined, and well-settled in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences, they are problematic in legal studies. This is so because what traditional law schools and lawyers call “legal research” may not be recognized as research at all by other disciplines within the university. The law school is a creature of both the university and the legal profession, and it must serve both and work with both even though those two roles 1 University of Hong Kong (HKU) Faculty of Law, Department of Law. Juris Doctor, University of Utah (USA) College of Law (1980); PhD, University of Hong Kong Department of Law (2007). ii may sometimes conflict. It is a fluid and constantly evolving situation. If the work of law RPG students, and of their counterparts in other disciplines, is to achieve global recognition beyond the local law school, they must cultivate full-bodied “legal scholarship” in contradistinction or addition to traditional “legal research,” with distinct understandings of what counts objectively as “new,” as a “contribution,” and as “knowledge,”—and to whom and why they count globally. This requires them to identify their “core competence” as RPG researchers in a world where education is increasingly commodified as a business model. Only by doing this will their research product “pass without objection in the trade.” iii Acknowledgments I am the beneficiary of many great teachers of many years—Wilson R. Thornley, M. Thatcher Allred, Rod Julander, Gordon T. Allred, Gary S. Williams, Eric B. Shumway, John J. Flynn, Edwin B. Firmage, Robi Kahakalau, M. Puakea Nogelmeier, Albert J. Schütz, John Charlot, Steven Goldsberry, Albert H. Y. Chen (陳弘毅), Jill Cottrell, and Fu Hualing (傅華伶)—whom I thank for their inspiration and steadfastness. Much of the theory that I develop in this book arises out of my experience teaching Advanced Research Methodology (ARM) LLAW 6022 at HKU from 2005 to 2011, and before that as an RPG student and PhD candidate at HKU 2002-2007. I am grateful to the RPG students in my classes and their supervisors at the University of Hong Kong, as well as to those with whom I have worked in other disciplines and departments, for all they have taught me about the issues discussed here and for the contributions they have made to this study. This book is dedicated to them. iv The law is the calling of thinkers. —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Inā he ‘ike hou aku kekahi, e pono ke ali‘i e hele ilaila, no ka mea, aia nō ka pono o kēia hana ‘o ka pau mai o nā ‘ike apau, o pā auane‘i i ka hoa ho‘opāpā. If you want some new knowledge, it is right for you the chief to go there [to the place of knowledge], because the correct procedure of this work lies in exhausting all the different knowledges, lest you perhaps be defeated by your companion in the contest of wits. —Hawaiian story of Kalapana v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract. ii Acknowledgments. iv List of Figures . viii Appendices . ix Foreword. 1 The Ten Rules. 23 Introduction & Background . 25 a. Further versus Higher . 25 b. Objective, Not Subjective. 29 c. Law School—Fish or Bear’s Paw. 45 d. Audiences. 51 A Case Study: That versus How. 59 “Jack-of-All-Trades” Academicians . 64 What Counts as “New”. 71 What Counts as “Knowledge”. 83 Non-Law Law. 88 Supervisors. 94 A Bit of Retrenchment. 104 Summary, Conclusions, & Recommendations. 110 vi The Ten Rules Redux (with notes). 118 Afterword. 134 About This Book. 139 Glossary . 147 Bibliography. 151 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 . 13 Figure 2 . 27 Figure 3 . 33 Figure 4 . 77 Figure 5 . 114 viii APPENDICES Appendix A. Diagnostic Quiz . 121 Appendix B. Personal Information Worksheet . 126 Appendix C. Hawai‘i Empirical Exercise. 130 ix Foreword The Teacher said: “There is nothing new under the sun.” 2 It is a rebuttable presumption, but whoever claims to have something “new” to contribute has the burden of proving it. Newness that matters, substantive newness, is never assumed. It must be demonstrated. Surely, a scholarly offering in the law must be not only new but importantly new, yet it must respect the law’s reverence for form, tradition, precedent, and authority.3 This may be difficult to achieve. “What’s new” runs the gamut from the trivial to the unique—and every point in between. A scholarly offering in the law can be made by both law students and others, and hence the title—Students of Law. This Guide is for RPG students in all schools and all disciplines who are working in any aspect of postgraduate legal research. This is not precisely a book on “how to conduct legal research.” It a discussion of some of the different research methods and approaches available to RPG scholars, but it is not a nuts- and-bolts procedural manual. This is a crucial difference. “How-to” books abound for whatever kinds of specialist research you may want to conduct (black letter, empirical, comparative), and I am not trying here to duplicate them. The “core competence” of this book, rather, is the definition of a single concept: the “new contribution to knowledge” in the law and the problems and questions that surround that concept. Its mission is to guide all prospective RPG candidates in any discipline (not just law students but all students of the law) through the issues and pitfalls that surround RPG work. Like much of the RPG project itself, this book is self-instructional: you are both student and teacher. RPG work is very much a causa sui project—that is why it is “new.” It is literally your own special invention. This work is especially important because in the typical RPG course over a period of even a few years, the RPG student will move into the rapidly evolving world of 2 Old Testament, Ecclesiastes 1:9. “What has existed before will exist again, and what has been done before will be done again.” 3 Phillip C. Kissam, “The Evaluation of Legal Scholarship” (1988) 63(2) Washington Law Review 221; Note, “Originality” (2002) 115(7) Harvard Law Review 1988 (part of a symposium on the subject); Mathias M. Siems, “Legal Originality” (2008) 28(1) Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 147; Susan Bartie, “The Lingering Core of Legal Scholarship” (2010) 30(3) Legal Studies 345. 1 what we now call the future. * * * The young lawyer John Adams (1735-1826), in words perhaps typical of young people just starting out, lamented somewhat insecurely to his diary: “Reputation ought to be the perpetual subject of my Thoughts, and Aim of my Behavior. How shall I gain a Reputation! How shall I Spread an Opinion of myself as a Lawyer of distinguished genius, Learning, and virtue…. Why have I not Genius to start some new Thought. Some thing that will surprize the World. New, grand, wild, yet regular Thought that may raise me at once to fame. Where is my Sout? Where are my Thoughts. When shall I start some new Thought, make some new Discovery, that shall surprize the World with its Novelty and Grandeur?”4 The diary entry is dated March 14, 1759. Adams was twenty-four, admitted to practice at the Massachusetts bar the same year after having graduated from Harvard College and having “read law” for nearly three years in the office of an established practitioner. The question that nagged him was: “Shall I creep or fly[?]” In the passage quoted, he pondered, then rejected, three possibilities by which to distinguish himself. One, he could make “frequent Visits in the Neighbourhood and converse familiarly with Men, Women and Children in their own Style,” but that would “take up too much Thought and Time and Province Law.”5 Second, he could impress by “making Remarks, 4 John Adams, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams. L. H. Butterfield, Leonard C. Faber, and Wendell D. Garrett (eds). (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 4 vols, 1961), I:78, 95, original spelling and punctuation; quoted in Susan Dunn (ed), Something That Will Surprise the World: The Essential Writings of the Founding Fathers (New York: Basic Books, 2006), pp. 3-4; retaining Adams’s original emphasis and spelling. 5 Adams Diary, ibid. p. 78. 2 and proposing Questions [to] the Lawyers att the Bar, endeavour to get a great Character for Understanding and Learning with them,” but “this is slow and tedious.”6 Third, he could “look out for a Cause to Speak to, and exert all the Soul and all the Body I own, to cut a flash, strike amazement, to catch the Vulgar,”7 but these projects, he concluded, would not “bear Examination.”8 He continued this intellectual trial-and-error long past his twenty-fourth year.
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