Should Eugene Volokh have received IRB approval before engaged in his law review experiment? Dan Filler asks this question here. As an experiment, the UCLA law professor participated in the UCLA Law Review write-on competition.
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I do think that much of the empirical legal research law that professors conduct is generally appropriate for IRB review - indeed, more than is generally assumed. This particular endeavor, though, doesn’t seem to fit the requirements. Going by what I recall of my university’s rules, IRB approval is required for research on human subjects. This law review effort does seem to be “research” - an effort to collect generalizable information for publication by a university-affiliated researcher. But query whether it is really research on “human subjects” - it seems to neither collect identifiable private information nor to be research about the individuals with whom Prof. Volokh interacted. So I vote “no.”
Posted by: Jeremy A. Blumenthal | 11 May 2006 at 09:31 AM