16 Febbraio 2023
ENRESSH webinar: “Evaluating legal research – an unregulated practice?”
In cooperation with the Research on Research institute (RoRI), The European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and Humanities (ENRESSH) presents a webinar in its series on research evaluation as it is practiced across disciplines and countries. The webinar will focus on legal research building on a recent example from a national research assessment in Norway and experiences of institutional assessment of legal research in Denmark, Sweden, and France.
PROGRAMME
20 February 2023 14:00 – 15:30 CET
EVALUATING LEGAL RESEARCH – AN UNREGULATED PRACTICE?
Introduction: Evaluation of legal scholarship at a glance Senior researcher Ginevra Peruginelli, Institute of legal informatics and judicial systems, CNR (Italy)
The evaluation of legal research in Norway, or how to build a working definition of research quality? Professor Henrik Palmer Olsen, Faculty of law at Copenhagen University (Denmark)
How to evaluate legal research? Possible benchmarks based on practical experience as an evaluator Professor Jan Wouters, KU Leuven (Belgium)
Until recently, the notion of an explicit and independent assessment of the quality of legal research has been unusual. There is no theory of evaluation for legal sciences and what actually leads legal academics to assess a work is based on an undefined concept of quality of judgments. This creates a number of conceptual and practical difficulties that produce confusion and unease in the sector. On one hand, there is pressure to establish procedures and develop more explicit indicators of scientific quality in this area, and on the other hand, there is no general consensus about the way in which to conceptualize the quality of legal research, and this is hindering a challenging discussion.
In particular, legal science is a very nationally oriented discipline, heavily intertwined with legal practice and without an explicit scholarly methodology. It is not monolithic as it includes different and well-established fields and research areas. Many are the outputs through which it is manifested (comments on case law and on legislation, review, encyclopaedia entries, books…). Furthermore, there are no European ranking of law journals or legal publishers, no uniform system of peer review, no bibliometric databases, and no consensus on quality indicators for academic legal publications.
All these issues offer to legal scholars, evaluation professionals and policymakers some food for thought regarding the future of the evaluation of legal science also in light of the current challenging reform of research assessment and arise some other relevant questions related for example, to the real effect of the evaluation choices for academic values such as integrity and freedom of research.
Video recording of the webinar available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFBy3FHp1sA
