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Access to Justice

Inquiry into empirical research about law - report summary now available

Thu, 3 May 2007

Towards the end of 2006, Nuffield Foundation launched the final report of its inquiry into Britain’s capacity to carry out empirical research about law. The summary of the report is now available and can be found, along with the main report and other materials, on the inquiry web-site, at http: //www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/socio-legal/empirical/.

Over the next few months, the Nuffield Foundation, in collaboration with an implementation group headed by Professor Dame Hazel Genn, will continue to promote discussion of the report and its findings, and to explore what steps can be taken to address the short-fall in capacity that the report documents. The implementation group are discussing these issues not only with legal academics and their learned societies, but with other learned societies across a range of social sciences and with a number of major funders. A series of working suppers are being planned for summer and autumn 2007 to discuss what actions might be taken by universities, research institutes and government departments with an interest in the issue.

Our aim is to encourage a number of practical steps. We hope a number of funders will consider how they might bring new researchers from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to this important area of research. We hope new training opportunities will be funded.

We are hopeful too that there may be some consideration of how we can create settings, focused perhaps on particular problems or topics, where rigorous empirical evidence can be brought to bear on normative legal thinking in ways that will yield conceptually important and practically useful results.

Last Updated Wed, 9 May 2007