  As part of growing NLP capabilities, coupled with an awareness of the ethical
dimensions of research, questions have been raised about whether particular
datasets and tasks should be deemed off-limits for NLP research. We examine
this question with respect to a paper on automatic legal sentencing from EMNLP
2019 which was a source of some debate, in asking whether the paper should have
been allowed to be published, who should have been charged with making such a
decision, and on what basis. We focus in particular on the role of data
statements in ethically assessing research, but also discuss the topic of dual
use, and examine the outcomes of similar debates in other scientific
disciplines.
