The Elevator of Comparative Legal Research

Let me ask you a question. If you are a researcher interested in comparing laws and regulations related to indigenous peoples in several countries, which keywords should you use to find relevant information? Aboriginal Law, First Nations, Native Law, Tribal Law, Indian Law, something else, all of the above? Well, it depends. For those of you who have engaged in comparative research, be it legal or not, you know that the answer is always “it depends”. The reality is that different jurisdictions and legal systems have evolved and continue to do so in a myriad of disparate ways. This ever-changing meaning of terms and creation of unique concepts make comparative legal research a massive challenge even as the forces of globalization and transnational law force legal systems at times to become more hybrid and to interact more closely with one another. Despite this continuous interaction of legal systems and the impact of international law and standards, when it comes to comparative legal research, finding the keywords, which would help you access data, information and make sense of what’s going on, remains an intricate and obscure balancing act.

Given the fact that keywords are so crucial to comparative legal research, I dedicate a significant amount of time in my classes on how to find them, how to use them in different databases, use of taxonomies, and much more. Furthermore, I have written several posts before here in slaw on related topics.

In this post, I want to focus on what I call the elevator of comparative legal research. This visual metaphor helps me convey a clear message on the importance of how to choose keywords which are connected to their respective legal systems and how they can help researchers craft a robust comparative analysis from the initial steps on their research strategy. Let me tell you what I mean.

Are You Going Up or Down?

The idea of using the metaphor of an elevator or multiple ones came to me when explaining the idea that keywords come in different shapes and forms. Sometimes you are given a topic you’re working on, a particular area of the law, or whatever you’re interested in. Once you have keywords or terms from whatever you were given or your preliminary analysis, I tell my students or researchers to envision the countries, jurisdictions or legal systems they’d like to include in their comparative analysis as towers, towers made of keywords.

They can place the keywords they have in the middle “floors” of these towers, and then as they proceed with their research, they can move up or down the “floors” in their individual towers as they look for more related keywords, terms or categories. In this visual metaphor, they take the elevator in each tower to “upper floors” where they can find broader terms or categories which can help them connect these towers. The “lower floors” help researchers to identify narrower or more specific terms linked to the countries, jurisdictions or legal systems they chose and sometimes in their vernacular languages.

The purpose of this “elevator” metaphor or exercise is for researchers to visualize and/or map keywords which are related to their core research question and to clearly see how these keywords are linked both to broader and narrower terms. Once they have taken this elevator several times up and down in each tower, they usually end up with a good number of relevant keywords which allow them to find crucial information. Another important aspect of this exercise is to help researchers build connections or possibilities for the actual comparative analysis. They can use these keywords found in different “floors” to eventually create “bridges” between these towers. Those are the bridges which will lead to a robust comparative analysis.

Try it and let me know. I will love to hear comments, questions and even suggestions on how to modify and expand this concept. Comparative law and its research methods have always had a reputation of being undefined and incredibly complex. However, I personally believe that our current global world in fire calls for more crucial work on this topic.