The PhD program in Law has the following objectives:

• to advance legal research and scholarship, including traditional doctrinal approaches and integrating interdisciplinary perspectives into legal research;
• to foster the development of a critical, self‐reflexive and independent approach to research and scholarship, as well as the acquisition of transferable skills;
• to engage students with a range of conceptual, theoretical and methodological approaches to and debates within legal research;
• o familiarize students with the epistemological and philosophical underpinnings of research methodologies, the politics and ethics of research and the principles of research design, and to enable students to evaluate and apply a range of methodologies to research questions in law; and
• to further the preparation of legal academics who choose to complete formal degrees beyond the requisite LLM degree (which traditionally prepares legal academics for university teaching) and, in this way, to contribute to the further development of education in law and professional education for the practice of law as well as the further development of graduate education in law.

Students in the program will develop a critical understanding of law as a category of analysis in scholarly enquiry, which may include social dynamics, policy expression and belief systems, and will investigate the ways in which law intersects with other disciplines.