LAWS 3908. C Approaches in Legal Studies II
Winter 2022
Prof. Christiane Wilke
Research Reflection Assignment:
Instructions: Choose one of the options and write a short paper following the prompts.
Your essay should be between four and five pages long (double spaced, no extra space between paragraphs), excluding endnotes and/or bibliography.
Please make sure to explain relevant concepts and theories.
Cite your sources appropriately. You may use any citation format you find helpful, but the page numbers of the texts cited must be indicated. For example, use (Smith 1999: 20) rather than (Smith 1999) to refer to anything found on page 20 of the text.
Your title page should list the essay title, the option you chose (1 or 2), and the citation style.
The essay is due on 12 February 2022 at 11:59 pm in the Brightspace dropbox. If you are dealing with a situation that significantly impacts your ability to focus and complete this assignment, please let me know and we can discuss an alternate schedule.
If you have any questions, please send me an email: christiane.wilke@carleton.ca.
Option 1: Socio-Legal Approaches to International Law
Background:
The field of socio-legal research has developed with a focus on the social contexts of domestic law: poverty, economic power, gendered and raced inequalities, criminal punishment, and policing. In recent years, researchers in international law have explicitly taken up the project of adapting socio-legal theories and methods to the interdisciplinary study of international law.
Task:
Choose one scholarly article that uses socio-legal approaches to international law. Using this article as an example, reflect on how socio-legal approaches can contribute to our understanding of international law. (If you prefer, you can also compare how two different articles use socio-legal approaches to international law and draw your conclusions about the value and limits of these approaches.)
· Possible strategies:
· Explain key goals of (qualitative) socio-legal research
· Explain relevant features of international law or international humanitarian law
· Make an argument about how or why socio-legal approaches would be suitable (or unsuitable) to researching international law, what insights they can provide
· If you’re focusing on the limits of the article, consider if these limitations are due to the socio-legal approach or due to the author’s choices within this framework.
· In addition to course readings, this article might be useful as an example of socio-legal research: Rebecca Sutton, “Enacting the ‘civilian plus’: International humanitarian actors and the conceptualization of distinction,” 33 Leiden Journal of International Law (2020): 429—449.
Source Requirements:
· At least one scholarly article that uses socio-legal approaches to international law (from the course outline or elsewhere)
· At least three sources from the course outline
· In addition: any other sources you find relevant
Option 2: Envisioning Socio-Legal Research
Background:
Advocates for socio-legal research ask us to pay attention to how people use law in everyday life, how law works “on the streets,” and how legal norms are applied, resisted, or subverted in practice. In weeks one through four of this course, we have come across a range of questions about the role of international law in the everyday lives of people living under armed conflict.
Tasks:
Identify a problem that (a) involves some norms of international law, and (b) can be researched using socio-legal methods. What could a socio-legal approach to this issue look like? Identify a research question and a corresponding method that would allow you to answer the research question.
Reflect on (1) how this question & method would generate insights that differ from what we already know about international law and armed conflict, and (2) the challenges (epistemological, practical, and otherwise) involved in conducting this research.
(If you want, you can sketch two different research questions and corresponding methods and reflect on how these approaches would lead to different forms of knowledge.)
Possible strategies:
· Clearly identify a problem or issue; include citations & references.
· Refer to Banakar as well as Hesse-Biber for guidance on how to formulate research questions.
· To understand what kind of socio-legal approach you are sketching, refer to Banakar, Lieblich, and Hesse-Biber.
Source Requirements:
· At least one source (can be from the course outline) as a reference for the issue you are identifying
· At least three sources from the course outline (probably Hesse-Biber, Banakar, and Lieblich)
· In addition: any other sources you find relevant
Marking Rubrics
Assignments are marked out of 100 points according to the general criteria below. Argument: 40%, Structure & Evidence: 40%, Style: 20%.
The most basic criteria (the paper has argument) are listed first; the more advanced criteria are listed further down under each heading (e.g. argument is nuanced and original). As you’ll note, you don’t get points for simply trying to agree with me, but you will be rewarded for making an original argument.
Argument:
Does the paper have a coherent and plausible argument?
Are the arguments nuanced and original?
Does the paper show any awareness of the limits of its argument?
Does the argument connect theory, methods, and sources in a careful and insightful way?
Structure & Evidence:
Does the paper have a clear structure (introduction, analysis, conclusion)?
Does the structure support the arguments?
Does the paper provide appropriate evidence for the claims it makes?
Does the paper use appropriate sources for the tasks it wants to accomplish?
Does the paper make appropriate use of the sources? (Does it use the sources for evidence that they can support, does it assess the sources, does it over-rely on particular sources or kinds of sources?)
Style:
Is the writing clear and understandable?
Do the references consistently follow a recognized citation format? Is this format identified on the title page or in footnote 1?
How frequent and graves are spelling and grammar mistakes?
Is the language used in the paper appropriate? (for example no informal language, no complicated academic jargon)
Is the bibliography (if needed) complete and correctly formatted?
Last Completed Projects
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