Law Project Topics and Materials in PDF

Project Topics for Law Students: The Basics

The main thing you need to know before choosing a topic for your project is that such type of academic research has to investigate the problem and analyze all the consequences.

Secondly, the structuralizing and concentration on work will help you to create a great project. Now, we are going to outline the steps you can take to present amazing work whether you are a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard or a freshman at Yale.

Step 1: Select the Main Point of Your Topic

The most momentous and crucial point is the question of the project topic. Here you need to think over a lot of things. First of all, determine the area you are interested in, for example, family or oil and gas law, and only after that choose a specific topic. For instance, “the Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas Act: Fiscal Incentives, Guarantees, and Assurances.” If your professor or subject limits you, then look for something suitable and curious for you in this field. But in both cases, it should be a narrow topic.

Second of all, have a look at the base of investigation and clarify whether it has enough data for analysis or not. However, if you are going to work on a project about Nigerian legal systems, the chances are you will be lost in the flow of information. In this case, you can choose one of five distinct legal systems in Nigeria. We are talking about topics such as:

• English law, which dates back to Nigeria’s history as a British colony;
• statute law, which is passed by Nigeria’s government since independence in 1960;
• common law, developed by the judiciary since independence;
• customary law which applies in different parts of the country in accordance with local custom;
• and sharia law which is applied in certain northern states of Nigeria.

Seek out something that everyone has heard of but have not noticed before. And the last hint: be engaged in what you are doing. You need to be truly involved in this project because it will make the whole process much easier.

Step 2: Law Project Topics and Materials

Sources for a survey should be picked up carefully and thoughtfully. Start from the simple one – web pages, articles, and online books. In the century of modern technologies, the Internet helps a lot. Also, visit libraries. Many students believe that this way of information searching is old-fashioned, but they are wrong. There are a lot of helpful materials from books to newspapers and magazines which simply do not exist in a digital world. It will be the first stage of the topic research.

We do not want to disappoint you, but college textbooks are not good sources for original info. When you work on a project, you need to make sure that your topic is new. Moreover, you should connect it to other topics in the field. So, do previous deep research before you start working on your own project.

The next step is to go to the website “Google Scholar” which only finds research papers rather than regular websites. There are a lot of results for “statute law,” for example, and it is something you are looking for. The first thing you want to do is to read the abstract of the related paper. It will give you a clue on how to plan your work and explains the details of the future project.

Another step to find more information about your topic is to look at the last part of the work and find the list of references that you can make use of. You can also check the “cited by” option in Google Scholar. In this particular case, you will see down below the article “cited by 74.” It means 74 papers came after this paper but mention that topic somewhere in the text. Therefore, you will get more information which is related to your project.

Step 3: Types of Law Projects

Regardless of the topic you choose, there are two ways to present your project: analytical and argumentative. They have some differences that you need to be aware of. The goal of an analytical approach is to take a new look at an already-known topic. The point is to depict and convince the audience in your unique ideas and concepts.

If we speak about the argumentative project, it denotes that the topic of investigation is problematic and the author argues for one point of view. A problem should be disputable and confirmed with efficient arguments. What is more, it should have a counter-argument, which is the main cause of debate (actually confirms the existence of the opposite opinion). That is why it is so influential to figure out the goal of your project. All in all, this list may be extended with a great number of significant details.

Once you have figured out the aim of your project and read a lot of the sources, it is time for the “Quote and Comment” technique. The first thing you should do after reading all of that information is to pull out quotes, findings or facts that you found interesting and that jumped out to you. Then, comment on whatever you found interesting. So, practically speaking, make an overall opinion about what you are going to talk about. Connect the dots, find similarities and differences in the authors’ opinions, come up with the main point of your project. Think about your work as a chronological story which begins at point “A” (the introduction part) and moves towards point “B” (the conclusion).