Assessing the quality of legal research

Since the 1980s, legal academics, researchers, their institutions, and representative bodies such as the Council of Australian Law Deans (‘CALD’), have sought to produce a concrete and functional description of legal research and reach consensus on how the quality of legal research should be assessed. The predominantly national character of much legal research has traditionally been regarded as ill-suited to the application of ‘metrics’ which draw on citation statistics in international journals. But a convincing alternative to metrics has yet to emerge. This article reports and explains the findings from a project designed to address two key questions:

(1) do legal researchers perceive the ways in which their research is currently evaluated in Australia, both by their own institutions and by bodies such as the Australian Research Council, as transparent, fair, and appropriate?

(2) are there other frameworks which might more effectively evaluate the quality of legal research?

To explore these questions, we carried out a literature review of scholarship relating to the assessment of legal research in Australia and in key overseas jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and New Zealand, and from the first nationwide survey of Australian legal researchers.