[I] Dissertation Project Assignment

Please send me an extended outline of your dissertation supported by literature (i.e. not only bibliography at the end of the text) that will clearly answer

[1] WHY your project is important and what is its contribution to the field (for which you need to define the state-of-the-art in your field and identify the gaps)

[2] WHAT exactly you will research in your dissertation including research question(s) (please frame RQs as true questions) and potentially also hypotheses 

[3] HOW you want to achieve it, that is the RESEARCH DESIGN and the METHOD.

Please put emphasis on comparative questions, if you have them in your dissertation, as this course is mainly intended for study of comparativne methods.

As this is a methodological course, I am not interested in lengthy description of each planned dissertation chapter. The focus of your outline should be on the conceptual issues and on the HOW-question.  At this point, you should have a better understanding of your research design and method. Hence, I expect that you explain to me the logic behind the country/countries studied (e.g. why Poland and Hungary and not Romania or Slovakia?), scope of the inquiry, period covered, definition of variables (and ideally their operationalization, if appropriate), data collection, the method itself and also potential inaccuracies of your method.

As a sort of guidance, you can work the PhD outline of David Kosař (but you do not need to follow it strictly).

[II] Case Selection Assignment

The aim of this assignment is to introduce you to the foundations of case selection and comparison and to think about how it shapes any research endeavour. I hope it is self-evident why this topic is important: any research in legal science (or any other science) deals with at least one case and thus presupposes selection of these cases. Often the selection is intuitive (or based on expertise, language, time, access etc.) – this might not be wrong per se, but it is much more sensible to explore the logic of how and why we decide to cover this case and not the other. Your choice should be primarily determined by the theory you are building, exploring or testing in your PhD thesis. If two or more cases are included in your research proposal, the approach taken is of course comparation. Again, there are certain rules what type of comparison (and case selection) is appropriate for certain situation.

Please read the attached texts (again at IS.MUNI.CZ) and make notes from them:

•    Hirschl, The Question of Case Selection in Comparative Constitutional Law,

American Journal of Comparative Law, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Winter, 2005), pp. 125-155.

•    Seawright and Gerring, Case Selection Techniques in Case Study Research: A

Menu of Qualitative and Quantitative Options, Political Research Quarterly,

2008, pp. 293-308.

•    Linos, How to Select and Develop International Law Case Studies: Lessons

from Comparative Law and Comparative Politics, American Journal of Comparative

Law, 2015, pp. 475-485.

[If you are fluent in Czech, you may also skim through KOSAŘ, David a Jan

PETROV. Jak vybrat „případy“ do případové studie a pracovat s nimi v právu:

poznatky z výzkumu na pomezí práva a politologie. Jurisprudence. 2016, Vol. 25,

No. 6, pp. 21-30]

Based on these texts, please do the following assignment:  

Consult your PhD project. What cases did you choose and what drove your selection (including the link to your theory)? If you plan to utilize comparative method in the text, what kind of comparison it is and why? Again, try to use the sources to substantiate your arguments (max 500 words).

It would be great if you can send me your assignments by 15 December 2023. The workshop will follow in January