This guide is aimed at law students selecting a research paper topic. You should aim to find a specific, original research issue that you find fascinating. The process for choosing a topic varies but might involve the following steps.
Once you have finalized your topic, consider meeting with a librarian. Librarians can help you find and use targeted research sources for your specific project.
Browsing and reading blogs, law firm posts, and legal news will help you generate ideas. Try some of the sources below to find current legal developments and controversies ahead of their formal analysis in traditional scholarly sources such as books or law review articles.
After browsing current awareness services for ideas, hopefully you’re starting to have a few possible topics. Digging into working papers is a good next step. Working paper repositories host collections of scholarly articles not yet published or in final form. The benefit of searching in working paper repositories is to gain a sense of the current academic conversation on a topic.
As you begin to settle on a topic, you'll want to explore the legal academic literature. If your topic is not solely legal in nature, but falls in other academic disciplines like economics, sociology, political science, etc. you'll want to use HOLLIS and Google Scholar as you explore and refine your topic.
As you refine your topic ideas, it is often helpful to browse the titles of dissertations and papers by SJDs, LLMs, or JD students, either generally, or those which touch on your subject area. This can help you understand how people have framed their research topic in a discrete, specific way.
HLS LL.M. papers require faculty supervision. Discussing your topic with a potential faculty supervisor can be an important step in solidifying your topic ideas.
As you’ve browsed blogs, news, law reviews and other LL.M. papers, you have hopefully arrived at some topic ideas that are original and will hold your continued interest as you write your paper. It is also important to refine your paper topic to a discrete, narrow idea. To make sure your topic is sufficiently narrow, please see the resources included in the HLS Graduate Program Writing Resources Canvas Site. See especially:
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