Special Criteria for Student Research Papers Submitted for the HSE University NIRS Competition in Law

Dear students,

So that the experts may effectively assess your work, please be sure to format your work as per the following criteria.

I. The topic of your paper should be law or an adjacent subject field (e.g., philosophy of law, sociology of law, legal psychology, law and the economy, etc.).  

II. The contents of your paper should be in line with the specified topic, and, as best as possible, fully cover this topic while not straying from its core focus.  

The main part of the paper should follow a clearly defined structure, with sections, chapters and paragraphs following logically from one to the other and covering the general focus of the research.

The conclusion should provide your key findings – original theses (statements) based on the results of your research. Your theses should be verifiable, up-to-date, original and valuable for legal studies/legal practice.

The recommended size of a student paper is 40,000 symbols with spaces (1 author’s sheet). At the same time, your paper should have no less than 35,000 symbols and no more than 60,000 symbols with spaces.  

Your paper may also feature additional materials included in an appendix after the bibliography: illustrations, diagrams, graphs, tables, photographs etc., but they should only count for no more than 10% of the overall paper size.

III.Your research paper should contain footnotes (including the numbers of pages cited from a given publication) and a bibliographical description of sources of reliable information or academic/applied information.

The work should feature footnotes and descriptions of printed and/or electronic works produced by leading legal experts and/or practising lawyers, as well as other specialists, who have published peer-reviewed papers on the subject at hand.

In addition, sources of information for research may include legal and normative acts, administrative and court decisions/orders, statistical data, opinion survey outcomes and other relevant information (except for research papers built around a description of the methodology and the results of a legal experiment or a general opinion survey on one or several issues relating to law, held by an individual author or a team of authors).

IV.The paper must have a title page with the following information:

- title of the paper;

- competition (Bachelor’s/Master’s category). Attention: only indicate the Bachelor’s competition if, at the time when your paper is submitted, you are pursuing a Bachelor’s programme. In all other instances, please indicate the Master’s competition.

- abstract (from 100 to 200 words). Attention: please briefly state the problem studied in the paper and your proposed solution thereto.

- keywords (from 4 to 7 words).

V.If your paper does not follow the above recommendations, you may be assigned a much lower final grade, or your paper may be removed from the competition entirely.