I enjoyed physics research a lot: it involved a minimal amount of endlessly crawling through books. Legal research on the other hand, is a lot of “see, that guy said what I want to say, so by our combined power, my argument is strong.” I find that this procedure makes it somewhat difficult to “think outside the box.”
Sure, this approach makes complete sense for most legal applications. It’s essentially a technique of verifying stare decisis. Does it really make sense for research, though? I find that it’s particularly annoying as a Research Assistant because my adviser is always saying, “Find me something that says X.” For the most part, we’re not looking for statistics; we’re just looking for a similar statement so we can mark it down and make a footnote.
Sometimes we look for statistics, but it’s definitely the minority of the time. I get the impression that most legal scholars don’t collect their own data. I suppose that’s the difference. Scientists, in my experience, generate their own data at least as much as they rely on other peoples’ data. The application was always more fun, at least for me, than combing the tomography books looking for algorithms.
I think what it comes down to is that I learned this summer that I’m really looking forward to working for a firm and being involved in real cases. In that case, this sort of research is almost analogous to experimentation in support of a hypothesis.
While it is great to see a published paper and maybe having it influence policy, I’m looking forward to the prospect of having my research have an immediate impact on clients.
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The research you do for writing a scientific paper is actually very similar. Any concept or theory that isn’t an original idea of yours so this takes a fair amount of research to get all the citations for things that can be taken for granted as general knowledge in the field normally. Hope the summer research goes well.