prepare and write a ‘literature review’ in legal studies, of a kind suitable for incorporation into LLM essays

1. This third task is concerned with how you prepare and write a ‘literature review’ in legal studies, of a kind suitable for incorporation into LLM essays (and later your LLM dissertation). The skills required will bring together work we’ve done under several different headings already:
➢ searching for, browsing, and seeing the significance of materials including legal authorities and research articles to be found in the library and online
➢ summarising the essential legal elements of reported cases and other materials including: highlighting what is significant, leaving out what is unnecessary or extraneous; and joining up such mini-summaries coherently with material that precedes them and comes next in an essay (i.e. work we did on case notes)
➢ providing correct and sufficient references for material you mention (i.e. work we did on the OSCOLA referencing system, which is the system you must follow in this coursework – don’t just paste in references in different formats)
2. What you have to do is to write a short literature review, building on the template and guidance we provide below.
3. This task is primarily concerned with the scope, structure, coherence and accurate presentation of a “literature review” in legal studies – concerned with whatever legal topic they are about. You can only review a relevant body of legal materials once you’ve decided what the literature is relevant to. So your literature review must be about a given topic. You are free, in this task, to choose your topic (which must however be explicitly delineated in the title of the piece of work you submit). Choose between the two following general headings:
3.1 You can write a literature review that could be used to support investigation of any topic you’ve addressed in an LLM module this term (so long as you do not repeat material you’ve used in any piece of submitted assessed work). You must ensure that the topic you’re providing the literature review of is clearly stated in the title of the piece of work you submit.
Or
3.2 You can write a literature review that supports early investigation of a topic you wish to research as your LLM dissertation. Such a literature review would serve as a sort of ‘scoping exercise’. Again, however, you must ensure that you state the topic you’re providing a literature review of in the title of the piece of work you submit.
4. Here are some key elements you should keep in mind in writing your literature review. There are of course other ways of writing a literature review, and where a piece of work is submitted that goes beyond the essential elements we outline below that may be reflected in a higher grade. But the guidance that follows should ensure you are able to incorporate legal authorities and scholarship appropriately into essays assessed throughout your LLM programme, and that is our aim.
4.1 In legal studies, you need to keep in mind both the distinction and also the connection between (i) professional sources and (ii) academic literature. These two kinds of material have different statuses and play different roles. But they work closely together in legal-academic writing. This is part of what makes writing a ‘literature review’ in the academic study of law different from writing a ‘literature review’ in social science or natural sciences. (In some of those other fields, a literature review is a highly standardised, separate section in a written report, essay or thesis; it usually isn’t in law.)
4.2 In practical terms, a literature review embedded in a law essay must do the following:
• it should refer to the main legal sources (hence why the literature review stage of this module follows on from work we did on case notes , case commentary and case summary);
• it should mention, where appropriate, other kinds of institutional and public document (such as policy or committee reports, including preparatory documents discussing law reform or leading towards legislation);
• it should offer a descriptive overview of relevant academic books and journal articles (How many? This will vary but will be more than 2-3 but not so many that you don’t have space to discuss any of them – the literature review is not a list.)
4.3 Typically, in a law essay or dissertation the literature review is not titled as such and presented separately. It doesn’t usually stand alone as an essay section, as it would in a sociology or natural sciences essay. Rather, a literature review in law is likely to be woven into an essay: as (i) part of the introduction and description of context; or (ii) within a section dealing with defining the problem to be addressed, etc. For instructional purposes only, for this task we’ve separated out the literature review, in order to look more closely at its purpose and main features. That’s slightly artificial, but pedagogically essential.
4.4 A literature review serves a purpose and contributes to an overall argument. It is not just a list or summary. It has to show development if it is to achieve that purpose. The overall aim is to situate a project that an author is developing in his or her essay or dissertation within the larger context of existing legal scholarship.
4.5 To this end, a ‘review of the literature’ is needed as part of the process of defining a topical research issue/question. That’s why you’re not asked in this task to write a freestanding ‘literature review’ of a given topic: simply ‘the death penalty’, ‘breach of confidence’, ‘exemplary damages’, or ‘vertical and horizontal effect’. Each of these would require a neutral report or reference-material approach, or a whole textbook (or many textbooks). By contrast, as you will see from the guidelines above, you’re being asked to write a literature review that would support a particular essay topic containing an interpretive, critical or evaluative dimension: i.e. by serving as a contribution to an essay in which you develop an argument or point of view based in part on the account you offer of the currently available materials.
4.6 Your literature review is likely to begin with a short general statement of how the issue/question you’re writing about is commonly perceived or approached: this is your ‘way in’. You identify some unresolved dimension or aspect that makes your chosen topic worth writing about. This introductory overview is usually placed in a (necessarily simplified) historical context (time, jurisdiction, social climate of opinion, etc.). But it must be historicised in this way: a literature review is the published story of how people have engaged with, investigated, and constantly redefined a topic.
4.7 The main body of the literature review introduces key sources and works, briefly highlighting not only their scope and content but also their type (are they legally authoritative sources, academic reference works, partisan or even polemical arguments?). Where significant, you should indicate how particular documents or publications have been received by other professionals, scholars and/or the wider public, including what influence they may have had (distinguishing for instance between a widely acknowledged study in the field and a relatively unknown article you may have discovered almost by chance).