Federal regulations require universities to maintain something called an Institutional Review Board which preapproves research on human subjects to make sure it is not improperly injurious to the persons being studied. There is a certain kind of logic to such requirements when it comes to, say, invasive medical experiments. “Yet the human subjects protection racket has been able to extend its claws around social science research, subjecting it to the same rigmarole as demanded of the medical types,” writes Mark Kleiman (Sept. 8). “This is stupid, because almost no social science research actually poses important risks to its subjects that couldn’t be handled perfectly well by an informed-consent system audited retrospectively rather than a pre-approval system”. He adds:
Worse, since social-science research is often controversial, the risks of censorship are much more prominent, especially given diversity requirements demanding, for example, that a representative of prisoners be involved in clearing any study involving prisoners.
Any collection of data from an identifiable person counts as “human-subjects research,” even, for example, interviewing a group of judges about how they handle probation revocations. How answering such questions puts the judge at risk is more than I can figure out. And heaven help you if you submit a proposal saying “I intend to ask judges what happens in probation cases.” That’s far too vague: you have to submit a questionnaire for review, as if you knew in advance what questions were going to turn out to be relevant.
Update: for more, see Point of Law, Dec. 7, 2006 (paper by Dale Carpenter).
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