Research Ethics in Legal Writing: Challenges for Empirical Research

The conference program for the 2018 LWI Biennial Conference provided evidence of a growing interest in empirical research in legal writing. Ann Nowak’s presentation, based on the article for which she received the Deborah Hecht Memorial Writing Award, and a panel by Shaun Spencer, Kenneth Chestek, Brian Larson, and Lance Long were just two out of a number of sessions devoted to such studies. Empirical research can come in many forms: while some scholars draw on publicly available documents, others conduct research that involves the participation of individuals who have been specifically recruited to help answer research questions. While both forms of research present challenges for research design, the latter poses unique ethical issues that will need to be addressed by the legal writing community as more and more such studies are published