Transferring Methods to Law: A Reflection on Using Scoping Reviews

Abstract

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.