Teaching Legal Research Methodology in Indonesian Islamic Higher Education: A Curriculum Analysis

Abstract

Complaints about the quality of student legal writing in Indonesian Islamic higher education are widespread, yet they are usually attributed to student motivation rather than to the design of the curriculum that is supposed to produce research competence. This article aims to analyse how legal research methodology is currently positioned within sharia and law study programmes, to identify the design features that limit the development of research competence, and to propose a reconstruction grounded in established principles of curriculum alignment. The study is conceptual and analytical, combining document analysis of the national higher education regulatory framework with a critical reading of the methodological literature on doctrinal legal research and of the learning-sciences literature on competence development; no field data were collected. The analysis shows that methodology instruction is typically positioned as a single mid-programme course assessed by a proposal document, that its content is dominated by the classification of research types rather than by the reasoning operations that legal research actually requires, and that the final thesis therefore becomes the first occasion on which those operations are practised. Three design consequences follow: competence is assessed before it is taught, supervision is required to compensate for curricular omission, and Islamic legal reasoning is treated as a separate subject rather than as an integrated methodological resource. The article recommends a spiral distribution of methodological work across the programme, assessment by research artefacts rather than by proposal documents, and explicit integration of uṣūl al-fiqh reasoning into the methodology sequence