FL850 – Legal Research Methods & Legal Academic Writings

The objective of this course is to introduce students to legal research methods and legal academic writing. Firstly, the course is designed to equip students with the appropriate tools to gain the full benefit of access to legal research sources. Nowadays, legal data is abundant and widespread on open source gateways, but not always systematically fashioned, making their use an uneasy exercise. Besides, legal databases do host materials of high value, but their exploration presents technical complexity. The course aims to prepare students for careers in the law that demand knowledge and development skills, not only in an auxiliary and instrumental fashion. Secondly, the course aims to aid students impeding research findings into legal reasoning and elaborate legal argumentation appropriately. This effort is enhanced by academic, judicial case reading, to allow students to provide rigorous, accurate, and reliable legal advisory and litigation documentation writing. The stakes are high in the particularly demanding environment of financial and tax law. Seeking this objective, by the conclusion of the course, students are expected to discern pertinent legal questions and to undertake researching case history. By these means, they are to determine the state of positive law in the specific area and to construct legal writings. Beyond this objective, the students are expected to communicate these findings in clear two-way communication orally and efficiently liaise with people from non-legal backgrounds. Foremost, the approach suggests heavily emphasizes on understanding citation methods and requirements, on the crucial distinction between hard and soft law in legal writing, and on the differentiation in language styling for writing between memos and briefs. The teaching methods applied shall help students for writing in law, as an advisor, attorney or in-house lawyer, but also writing about law, preparing a master thesis, articles, policy papers, seminars and eventually a Ph.D. thesis.