  Natural language processing (NLP) methods for analyzing legal text offer
legal scholars and practitioners a range of tools allowing to empirically
analyze law on a large scale. However, researchers seem to struggle when it
comes to identifying ethical limits to using NLP systems for acquiring genuine
insights both about the law and the systems' predictive capacity. In this paper
we set out a number of ways in which to think systematically about such issues.
We place emphasis on three crucial normative parameters which have, to the best
of our knowledge, been underestimated by current debates: (a) the importance of
academic freedom, (b) the existence of a wide diversity of legal and ethical
norms domestically but even more so internationally and (c) the threat of
moralism in research related to computational law. For each of these three
parameters we provide specific recommendations for the legal NLP community. Our
discussion is structured around the study of a real-life scenario that has
prompted recent debate in the legal NLP research community.
