Is It Ever Okay Not to Disclose Work for Hire?

Abstract

As best I can determine, there’s no linguistics journal, organization, or conference that has any official policies regarding disclosure of fees, consulting, conflicts, and the like. I take that as a testimony to the general economic insignificance of our results. Of course there are some people who have a financial interest in getting language right, but they almost never have a stake in having the results come out in any particular way. It's hard to see how anybody could make a lot of money from persuading everybody that small clauses exist, the way a pharmaceutical company can profit enormously in if it can seem to prove that drug X is an effective treatment for such-and-such a disease, whether or not it actually is. You don’t have to worry about ethical issues when the author has an obvious and unequivocal interest in doing the science right. They only become important when the author might conceivably have an interest in doing the science wrong. Of course there are a few areas of linguistics where the lack of disclosure could obviously be important. Technology, for example: if you write a paper for a conference extolling the virtues of LFG-based parsers and you work for a company that makes tools that use those parsers, you’d be best off letting the readers know that. That seems self-evident. Things are a little more complicated in forensic linguistics. When linguists offer their opinions as consultants in a legal matter, after all, it’s a matter of record who has retained them. So ethical questions about disclosure are only going to become relevant after the linguist has opined on some issue as an expert witness in the legal context and then returns to the same issue later on in an academic or other nonlegal setting--writing a book, article, or review, or giving a conference presentation. And even then, disclosure is usually made. After all, most of these second-look publications come from linguists who want to revisit a case because it raises interesting points about forensic linguistics. It’s a satisfying exercise, if only because you get to share all your clever arguments with an audience who are in a better position to appreciate them. In those situations you’re naturally going to mention your own involvement in the case you’re writing about. But an interesting situation with regard to disclosure arises when the linguist revisits her testimony not for its legal significance, but as a scholarly question in its own right. For example, I once worked on a case that involved some interesting questions about racism. This was a defamation case where the American Civil Liberties Union, who were filing an amicus brief in the case, asked me to opine on whether the word