Journal of Legal Research Methodology

Transferring Methods to Law: A Reflection on Using Scoping Reviews

Katrien Steenmans — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Explicit engagement and detailing of methods are not always expected or required practices within legal scholarship, as evidenced, for example, by the absence of method sections in many leading legal journals. Yet, methods provide the foundation to scholarship and its description facilitates the review of research reliability and validity. As a result of the oft-absent explicit engagement with methods in law, literature within other disciplines can inform legal scholars on, inter alia, methods outside traditional legal scholarship, their motivations, and their methodologies. Such practices, however, raise questions including: To what extent can legal scholars ‘transplant’ or adapt methods from other disciplines to research in law? How to effect such method transfers to legal research? What adjustments to methods are needed when transferring across disciplines? How are non-traditional legal scholarship methods received within law? This paper aims to contribute to these questions through a retrospective reflection on the author’s own experiences in undertaking scoping reviews within environmental law and their perceived acceptance (and at times lack thereof) in peer review processes. Scoping reviews were first used within health and medical sciences to identify, chart, and summarise data, but are now widely established in other fields. This paper first examines the value and limitations of scoping reviews as discussed in other disciplines, as well as within the context of legal scholarship. It then reflects on the challenges of using a non-legal research method based on the author’s own experiences. The paper concludes by summarising the lessons learnt from transferring a method across disciplines to inform other such adaptations.

From Maverick to Mainstream: Autoethnography’s Place in Legal Research

Dr Elaine Gregersen — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Autoethnography, a research method that uses lived experience as data, has grown steadily in prominence over the past two decades. Once a marginal approach, autoethnographic research is now recognised across disciplines, with dedicated conferences, textbooks and journals. Legal scholarship has begun to engage with autoethnography more recently, with applications emerging across legal education, legal practice, and doctoral research.

This growing body of work represents a welcome methodological expansion within the legal academy. At the same time, it marks a critical moment for autoethnography’s development in law. As interest in the approach increases, three interrelated challenges have become apparent. First, autoethnography is sometimes conflated with reflective or autobiographical writing, overlooking the thick description and analytical rigour the method demands. Second, to date, the breadth of autoethnographic practice remains underutilised within law; the field has yet to engage fully with the diversity of forms and frameworks available. The third and most complex challenge relates to ethical risk. Questions of researcher vulnerability and self-care remain insufficiently addressed within legal autoethnography.

This paper traces the emergence of autoethnography in legal research and offers a critical examination of its possibilities, its perils, and the ethical complexities that accompany its practice. In doing so, it argues for a more methodologically informed and ethically attentive engagement with autoethnography in law.

The Reflexive Local AI (RLAI) Framework: a methodology for AI-assisted transcription in empirical legal research

Lloyd Brown, Ryan Brown — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Automated transcription has been increasingly adopted to relieve the burden of manual transcription in qualitative research, including empirical legal scholarship. Yet cloud-based commercial transcription services raise serious data security and confidentiality concerns, particularly where terms of service reserve rights to use uploaded content for model training. Existing scholarship, notably Da Silva’s work extending Bokhove and Downey, has identified these vulnerabilities and responded with a risk management framework grounded in security practice. This article departs from that framing. It grounds the case for local processing not merely in prudent risk mitigation, but in the specific legal architecture of UK data protection law, arguing that local processing of interview data may constitute a necessary technical and organisational measure under Article 32 UK GDPR, in the absence of a vetted, institutionally governed processing arrangement. Drawing on the author’s experience conducting thirty-three elite interviews for a British Academy/Leverhulme-funded project on pension governance and climate risk, this article develops that legal analysis into the Reflexive Local AI (RLAI) framework: five interlocking principles addressing local processing, human interpretive oversight, contextual anonymisation, transparent documentation and reflexive engagement. The article situates this framework within the methodological literature on transcription as constructivist interpretation, before analysing its legal foundations under Articles 5, 28 and 32 UK GDPR and Chapter V’s international transfer regime. It concludes by identifying the framework’s practical and empirical limits, and by proposing directions for its extension beyond transcription into AI-assisted qualitative analysis.