UCL Research Proposal Example: Law applicant deciding LLM or policy MSc (Score 93)

This proposal examines how domestic regulatory agencies exercise discretion when primary legislation leaves implementation standards underspecified. The central question is: under what conditions do regulators adopt rule-based versus standard-based instruments when statutory mandates are ambiguous, and what determines compliance outcomes across those instrument types? Legislative ambiguity is structurally embedded in many regulatory frameworks, yet doctrinal literature treats this primarily as a statutory interpretation problem rather than an empirical regulatory design question. Two bodies of scholarship bear on this question. Administrative law scholars focus on judicial oversight of agency choice, drawing on proportionality review and related doctrines governing deference to regulatory judgement. Regulatory governance scholars treat instrument selection as a function of information asymmetry, enforcement capacity, and industry structure. Neither literature adequately addresses the interaction between legal form and implementation outcome at the agency level: doctrinal accounts rarely test compliance effects empirically, while governance accounts often abstract away from the legal constraints agencies face. This proposal occupies that intersection. The study uses structured comparative case analysis of two UK regulatory domains where statutory ambiguity is documented: financial conduct regulation and environmental permitting. For each domain, I will code regulatory instruments issued over a defined five-year window against a rule-versus-standard typology, then link instrument type to published enforcement and compliance data. Semi-structured interviews with regulatory lawyers and agency staff will test whether coded distinctions match practitioner understanding. This design is tractable within one academic year and does not require access to non-public data. All primary materials — statutory instruments, guidance, published enforcement decisions — are publicly available. Interview participants will provide informed consent under standard ethics procedures; no sensitive personal data will be collected. The main feasibility risk is interview access, mitigated by a document-only fallback. Timeline: literature mapping and coding framework (months 1–3); document coding and data assembly (months 4–7); interviews and analysis (months 8–10); writing and revision (months 11–12). UCL Laws hosts research in regulatory theory and administrative law that directly engages the intersection of legal form and governance outcomes. The programme's emphasis on law in its regulatory and policy context, rather than purely doctrinal analysis, matches this project's design.