In this article, the question is raised to what extent the methodology debate in legal scholarship has improved the practice by PhD researchers of justifying their methodology. Over the past twenty years, there has been much more consideration and discussion of legal methods, especially in Dutch academia. Taking this Dutch debate as a starting point, Taekema and Van Klink argue that it has led to a normative framework with which the methodology of legal research can be assessed. Formulating a set of topics and questions that form the core of this framework, they apply it to a set of six fairly recent PhD dissertations. Building on these cases, they observe that some progress is made from a methodological point of view, compared with the situation described by Tijssen in his PhD thesis from 2006. Taekema and Van Klink conclude, however, that the methodology debate appears not to have led to a significantly better practice of methodological justification, at least not yet on all assessment criteria. The normative framework of a dissertation, for instance, still deserves attention.

Migration and asylum are global phenomena. Yet they lack a universally accepted and applicable legal regulatory framework, which leads to fragmentation across different levels and fields of analysis. In this contribution, we focus on migration and asylum law (MAL) which we understand to be made up of national, regional and international laws as well as their implementation in practice. The aim of this article is to identify developments in the area of MAL and the scholarly voices that have contributed to ground-breaking legal scholarship. We approach the question of progress in MAL scholarship based on our combined expertise in human rights, refugee law and migration law and bring forward how, in these often-separate legal fields, similar progress has been made. We focus our discussion on three interactions that we consider to have changed the way in which legal scholarship addresses migration and asylum: interactions between national and other sources of law; interactions between different fields of law, crossing into human rights law, family law or labour law; and interactions with various empirical scholarships (section 3). Learning from sociology and anthropology scholarships, the intersection of social stratifications such as gender, race and ethnicity, and class is now firmly grounded in MAL scholarship, inspiring the methodological shift from black letter law to empirical legal studies.