This doesn't necessarily seem unusual to me. How long was the prospectus? When I had to prepare mine for my dissertation it was just a fairly short (less than 20 pages, I think) description of what I wanted to do and why I thought it was important as well as what I expected the parts to be along with a very preliminary bibliography. The committee members read it and said it was fine, offering a few suggestions. There was no oral defense of it but if there was I can't see why it would have lasted more than 15 minutes assuming that there were no serious problems. Suggestions were better given in writing anyway. So, this doesn't seem to be especially unusual to me. (In general oral defenses are more for show these days anyway, I think, even for the final dissertation- a good committee won't let you defend unless you're ready anyway and the real back-and-forth should have happened over drafts of chapters long before that. The oral defense survives more for the sake of tradition than anything else, it seems.)
Congrats! Yes, I think the reminder to keep your audience legal rather than sociolegal is an important one. Much as your adviser and affiliated faculty may differ, it's still a marginal subfield.
One small but significant correction: qualitative and quantitative are BOTH empirical work... and don't let anyone tell you otherwise!
congrats!! Good for you. When I defendend, the sent me out of the room (mine was at least an hour) for 5 minutes and I came back and was told the vote. Then I told them I was pregnant.
Thanks, everyone!
1. Congratulations!!!!!
2. I am renting a time machine, I'm going back to 1997 and then I'm enrolling in your graduate program. Yet, the weird thing is that I still end up as a sociologist @ IU. How does that work?
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