RESEARCH METHODOLOGY IN HISTORICAL AND LEGAL RESEARCH: POINTS OF CONVERGENCE AND DIVERGENCE

Abstract

Research methodology is frequently taught within disciplinary boundaries. Historians learn to work with archives, chronology, provenance, oral tradition, source criticism and corroboration; lawyers are trained to identify constitutions, statutes, judicial decisions and other authorities. Yet historical and legal researchers frequently confront substantially similar epistemological problems. Both must determine whether a source is authentic, what it means, how much reliance may properly be placed upon it, what other evidence supports or contradicts it, and how a scholarly claim can be made capable of independent verification. Drawing upon classical and contemporary scholarship in historical and legal methodology, Nigerian land law, constitutional history, oral tradition, empirical research and recent debates concerning generative artificial intelligence, this article examines these convergences and divergences. It develops the Ifidon Research Sequence, derived from a methodological formulation associated with Ifidon’s teaching, according to which the nature of the research determines the materials required and the nature of those materials determines the methodology appropriate for their analysis. The article argued that historians need not become lawyers, nor lawyers historians; where a research problem crosses disciplinary boundaries, however, familiarity with the other discipline’s methods can substantially improve the interrogation of evidence. It further argues that methodology should follow an evidential sequence rather than methodological fashion: the research question determines the materials, and the materials determine the method. In an age in which information has become extraordinarily easy to produce and retrieve, the enduring obligation of scholarship remains more demanding: interrogate the source and verify the evidence.