Theory and method of legal sciences have developed and have been refined over a period of more than a millennium. Methodology of positive law has become second nature to the lawyer, to such an extent that one is embarrassed to explain to anyone but a novice the nature of legal enquiry. This paper attempts to voice what often remains unsaid and to make it visible with the help of graphic tools. It attempts to literally map what lawyers do by intuition. Different tools are presented for the purpose of teaching and of research: the ‘ORC-grid’ for teaching and the ‘COBRA-C matrix’ for research. In this context the paper addresses the question to what extent the emergence of the ‘governance’ concept does or should influence legal method or theory.