Law and Social Sciences Program

The National Science Foundation, more often known as NSF, is a United States government agency that mainly supports essential research and education in all the non-medical related fields of science and engineering.

The attempts of the National Science Foundation are aimed at realizing their mission, which is to "To promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; and to secure the national defense."

In line with this particular mission, the NSF has constituted the Law & Social Sciences Program wherein it seeks to ask for proposals that could attend to social scientific studies of law and law-like systems of rules.

The Law & Social Sciences Program will be naturally interdisciplinary and multi-methodological. The guidelines of the program necessitates that in order for a proposal to be successful, it should contain research ideas that will advance scientific theory and the perception of the linkages between human behavior and laws or legal processes.

To make this happen, the proposal will need a dynamic approach that will concurrently accommodate multiple fields of studies, such as:

1. Crime, Violence and Punishment
2. Economic Issues
3. Governance
4. Legal Decision-making
5. Legal Mobilization and Conceptions of Justice
6. Litigation and the Legal Profession

The program also intends to simultaneously support proposals that aim to study historical, social, cultural and policy-related questions that concern the law.

The Law & Social Sciences Program is not just limited to funding proposals that happen to be entirely related to social scientific studies mainly because it can also be utilized for several other disciplines including anthropology, communication, criminology, economics, legal scholarship, political science, public policy, psychology, and sociology.

The National Science Foundation intends to administer up to $5,000,000 to 75 grant recipients under standard grants, continuing grants, or cooperative agreements.

The organizations and institutions which will be considered eligible to participate in the Law & Social Sciences Program are the following:

a) Standard Research Grants and Grants for Collaborative Research

b) Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Fellowships: US Academic Institutions

c) Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants: US Academic Institutions

d) Conference and Workshop Support

The Law and Social Sciences Program is greatly crucial to the National Science Foundation for the reason that objectives and goals of the program are incredibly in keeping the agency's mission.

Furthermore, the program will also work as an instrument into the development of innovative studies that will help better the people's comprehension of the law and how it affects our daily lives.

Michael Saunders is an editor of TopGovernmentGrants.com. He maintains Websites providing resources on small business grants and artist grants.