Posted on 11/24/2004 1:12:14 PM PST by jalisco555
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - When it comes to its students, Harvard University policy shows little tolerance for plagiarism.
Undergraduates found guilty of "misusing sources" will "likely" be required to withdraw from the college for at least two semesters. They will lose all coursework they have done that semester (unless it is virtually over), along with the money they have paid for it. They must also leave Cambridge.
With such a policy for students, what is Harvard to do when two of its most prominent law professors, Charles J. Ogletree Jr. and Laurence H. Tribe, publicly acknowledge that they have unintentionally misused sources, as happened this fall? Weighing in on the matter, Harvard's student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, said the university appeared to have one set of rules for its famous professors, and another for its students. In an editorial about Professor Ogletree, The Crimson wrote in September that his transgression would likely have resulted in expulsion for a Harvard undergraduate.
The revelations came amid an atmosphere of heightened concern about academic integrity, with the increasing reliance on the Internet as a research tool making it both easier to plagiarize, whether intentionally or not, and to catch those who do.
Colleges and universities across the country have been cracking down on student plagiarism, adopting honor codes and in some cases using sophisticated search engines to ferret out cheats. Students and scholars alike can be tossed out for plagiarizing.
The two professors said their errors were accidental, and no scholar has suggested otherwise, but as Howard Gardner, a Harvard professor of cognition and education, pointed out, many students could make the same argument.
"I've never had a student tell me that they intentionally plagiarized," said Professor Gardner, who studies moral and ethical standards among academics and other professionals.
In a mea culpa posted on his Web site, Professor Ogletree said that several paragraphs in his 380-page book "All Deliberate Speed" (W. W. Norton & Co., 2004), a memoir about his life as a child of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, had been taken "practically verbatim" from a Yale law professor, Jack M. Balkin. The error, he said, had occurred in his rush to meet a final deadline, when a pair of research assistants inserted the material into a draft of his manuscript and accidentally dropped the quotation marks and attribution.
The six duplicate paragraphs were discovered by an anonymous law professor, who sent letters to both the dean of the law school, Elena Kagan, and Professor Balkin. "It was a crushing experience," Professor Ogletree said, referring to his discovery of the error.
He immediately notified his publisher, he said, which then inserted an errata note in all the undistributed books.
After Professor Tribe, one of the nation's leading constitutional law scholars, publicly expressed sympathy for Professor Ogletree, and raised questions on a legal affairs Web site about the "larger problem" of "writers, political office seekers, judges and other high government officials passing off the work of others as their own," The Weekly Standard reported that Professor Tribe's 1985 book about the selection of Supreme Court justices, "God Save This Honorable Court," (Random House) had "perhaps an 'uncomfortable reliance' " on a book by an emeritus University of Virginia professor, Henry J. Abraham.
The article was prompted by a tip from a law professor who wished to remain anonymous, according to Joseph Bottum, The Standard's books and arts editor, who wrote the article. Mr. Bottum said he found identical 19-word sentences in both books, and more than a couple of dozen instances of similar wording.
Professor Tribe, who had been named recently by Harvard's president, Lawrence H. Summers, as one of 17 university professors, the highest academic ranking, immediately issued a public apology. His "well-meaning effort to write a book accessible to a lay audience through the omission of any footnotes or endnotes - in contrast to the practice I have always followed in my scholarly writing - came at an unacceptable cost: my failure to attribute some of the material The Weekly Standard identified."
His book, however, did credit Professor Abraham's book, "Justices and Presidents," (Oxford University Press, 1974) as the "leading political history of Court appointments."
Professor Tribe declined to comment on the matter. His office released a letter that it said Professor Tribe sent to Professor Abraham 20 years ago, along with a copy of Professor Tribe's manuscript; Professor Tribe wrote that he had drawn on Professor Abraham's book, in part, and asked for his reactions.
At the behest of Dean Kagan of the law school, Derek Bok, the former Harvard president, and Robert Clark, the former dean of the law school, examined Professor Ogletree's book. Dean Kagan said publicly that she concurred with their finding: Professor Ogletree's error was "a serious scholarly transgression." Professor Ogletree said he had been disciplined, but neither he nor Harvard officials would be specific.
Professor Tribe's lapse is still under review, according to Harvard officials.
"Academic integrity is crucial to everything we do at Harvard Law School, and I feel very strongly about upholding those principles," said Dean Kagan, who declined to talk about either case.
Professor Tribe's book, which argued that the Senate should exert more influence over the selection of Supreme Court justices, is widely seen as having helped Democrats defeat the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork. While some scholars see lapses like Professor Tribe's as an erosion of academic standards, others view the Standard's article on Professor Tribe - along with another one that suggested Professor Ogletree's tenure should be revoked because of his error - as an ideological attack.
"It's payback time," said Stephen Gillers, a professor of legal ethics at New York University Law School.
Professor Gardner said that while he did not know the specifics of the two cases, his concern about the underlying issues had prompted him to release a "statement about plagiarism."
"When norms of scholarship are violated in a material way - by students or by teachers," he wrote, "significant consequences should follow."
Some scholars argued that Professor Ogletree's statement was a public humiliation more severe than any punishment that could be meted out to a student.
"The discovery is the punishment," Professor Gillers said.
Stephen W. Stromberg, a Harvard senior who is the Crimson's editorial chairman, said, "Realistically, you're not going to fire Laurence Tribe or Charles Ogletree. They're both star professors who are still incredible assets for the law school."
According to Harvard's student plagiarism policy described in "Writing With Sources," a booklet that is required reading for freshmen, the university gives some latitude to undergraduates who misuse sources "out of genuine confusion." The administrative board, which handles undergraduate plagiarism cases, may decide to place such students on probation, according to the booklet. Last year six undergraduates had to withdraw from the college for academic dishonesty, which includes plagiarism.
Along with the growing use of the Internet for research, some scholars say the increasing reliance of scholars upon research assistants in the quest to publish increases the risk of the sort of academic error made by Professor Ogletree.
"This is what happens when you have managed books," Professor Gardner said.
Managed books, Professor Gardner said, are a recent phenomenon in which some academics rely on assistants to help them produce books, in some cases allowing the assistants to write first drafts.
"Scholarship - the core activity of the university - cannot be delegated to assistants," Professor Gardner said.
Ping.
The big H is truly an over-rated school.
Ah, but an underrated asylum.
Don't do what your teacher does; do what he says!
Steven Ambrose's reputation will never recover from exposes of his (frequent) plagiarism. I hope the same would be true for the Crimson Clowns.
It's pretty likely they use student assistants as ghostwriters and researchers. Giving them a wink on this is merely cover for the deeper silliness of professors not really doing their own work. But, hey, forget about the plagiarism - these guys are jerks and morons just on the facts.
Along with anyone who takes Harvard seriously. Or any of the other temples of liberal secular humanism.
Veritas. Hee, hee. That's pretty funny! Translates to "Pravda" in Russian.
If Kerry had won, Tribe would be getting nominated for the Supreme Court.
He would have been named Chief Justice.
Just another way to say a: loser.
Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize --
Only be sure always to call it please 'research.'
"This is what happens when you have managed books," Professor Gardner said.
Managed books, Professor Gardner said, are a recent phenomenon in which some academics rely on assistants to help them produce books, in some cases allowing the assistants to write first drafts.
"Scholarship - the core activity of the university - cannot be delegated to assistants," Professor Gardner said.
Here's the more serious problem: the professors didn't write their books. How can they be considered scholars anymore if they aren't researching and verifying? For shame, for shame.
Let everyone know what the punishment is to deter further infractions. Or to retain integrity of an institution.
Oh, for pete's sake! One lousy sentence in an entire book? Get a life!
Don't count on that being the case. Harvard and Yale have done a pretty good job of destroying higher education throughout America - spreading like AIDS. A false system of values and upscale bigotry do not produce healthy minds. Period.
"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
- Lord Acton
Do liberals ever have any good orginal thoughts, words or writings?
Part of me wants to cut these guys a break if they accidentally dropped a couple of quotation marks in one sentence within the entire book. (As against Martin Luther King jr. who plagiarized most of his PhD thesis.) But then again, if these guys were writing their own books (and thus doing their own thinking), they should realize what were their own words and what weren't.
I agree it is most horrible that these professors are not writing their own books. Yes, they have research assistants, and both side benefit: from help (the professor) and from experience (the assistants). But the real writing and ideas should come from the professor (unless, of course, that professor has already determined what the slant is going to be even before the research has been completed and can thus convey to the assistants what to write). I haven't seen that latter event in practice, but with the closed minds on liberal campuses I wouldn't be surprised.
After all, these professors only teach 2 courses a semester so they should have plenty of time to research, think, and write (vs. state colleges where the common teaching load is 4 courses a semester, with no teaching assistants to help grade). I think that after 6 hours of lecturing a week, they should have time to write their own books. And to proof read them carefully!
Hey, leave the guy alone, he said he was sorry, for crying out loud.<(•¿•)>
Which one, the teacher or the student?
LOL. Can't disagree with you there. One of the well-kept secrets of academia is how little undergraduate (and even graduate) teaching is done by these star professors. If only people knew what they were getting for their 43K per year.
I don't care what the motto of Harvard is....
Any one who sends their child there for an excellent undergradduate educaion is an idiot....
OK, the graduate school is different.
Harvard has become a legend in their own mind.
They don't impress me - a sewer of liberalism.
As rated by whom? It seems that the accomplishments if its graduates is the evidence to the contrary. Does your opinion arise from not getting in?
Harvard has long been an academic whorehouse. At one time during the 90's, a solid half of the Psychiatry Department of Harvard Medical School were in ethical and/or malpractice litigation for sexual boundary violations, including female faculty.
Then of course there's "Dr." John Mack who really truly believes that "abductees" are literally levitated into spaceships and experimented upon.
Students at Bohecker Tech have better sense than this.
And wasn't Timothy Leary ("Tune in, turn on, drop out" and advocate of LSD) on the Harvard faculty?
From all of the wailing about the subject you would think that professors had graduate students chained in carols in the library living off bread and water until they produced a book - on their own - which the professor then passes off as his own. It just doesn't happen like that.
The actual "crime" of plagiarism is stealing someone else's idea and passing it off as your own, and like all crimes there are matters of intent, degree, severity and consequence to adjudicate. A lot of the cases that one reads about are absolutely nothing. Downloading a term-paper from the internet and handing it in as your own effort is certainly fraud. Quoting from someone without attribution that the Washington Monument is x feet high with y stairs in z different stages is not exactly passing off an original idea as your own. Perhaps the formal rules of academic citation suggest that it should be properly footnoted, but good scholars are selective in their footnoting and avoid creating a telephone book of footnotes and bibliographical sources by citing the one that really provided new ideas, significant facts that are not generally known, or would not have been thought up by any knowledgeable person after 10 minutes reflection on the subject.
I am no fan of Lawrence Tribe, believe me, but the charge "Mr. Bottum said he found identical 19-word sentences in both books, and more than a couple of dozen instances of similar wording" is just completely absurd. If the sentence formed the central thesis of the book that would be one thing, but if it is just a fact illustrative of a central point of Tribe's, then that is completely different. Yeah, academic "courtesy" suggests Mr. Tribe attribute the sentance, but what he stole is not exactly an intellectual gem that formed the bedrock of the original author's academic reputation.
The real problem is the lack of realism, hypocrasy, unfairness and inutility of holding students to a standard of scholarship which even the Harvard faculty does not in fact practice - and the snearing aside, the Harvard faculty on the whole, maintain an excedingly high standard of scholarship. Part of this is the result of the fact that the Harvard faculty for the most part pay no attention to undergraduate education and turn it over to third rate instructors. It is these simpering idiot wannabe hasbeens who write rules that no one else obeys.
And was tossed out on his behind despite Joe Kennedy's wealth.
>>when a pair of research assistants inserted the material into a draft of his manuscript and accidentally dropped the quotation marks and attribution.<<
This is just outrageous. He gets caught, and then blames someone else. Add to the fact that this is probably a lie.
Typical liberal idiot.
>> After all, these professors only teach 2 courses a semester <<
That's pretty much a full load. Many profs don't teach any. Some only 1.
When I was an undergraduate at Cornell the university boasted that all faculty members had to teach one undergrad course per year. As if that was something to be proud of!
>>I am no fan of Lawrence Tribe, believe me, but the charge "Mr. Bottum said he found identical 19-word sentences in both books, and more than a couple of dozen instances of similar wording" is just completely absurd. If the sentence formed the central thesis of the book that would be one thing, but if it is just a fact illustrative of a central point of Tribe's, then that is completely different.<<
You are terribly wrong about this for several reasons. First, a book is nothing but ideas. You can't steal a car and put it in a book, but you can steal someone else's ideas and claim them as your own. The reader often doesn't know the difference. He or she who hasn't read the first work assumes, and it shouldn't be an uncalled for assumption, that the author was original in his thought. It makes no sense to publish a book that recites another book.
Second, while I agree with your reference to the Washington Monument, I think most readers, particularly of the so-called scholarship we are discussing, can easily see the difference between reciting facts and writing ideas. If Tribe only lifted technical details of when someone was on a court, what the rulings were, how they voted, etc., it wouldn't be an issue. However, if that is the case that these passages are more technical details than ideas, how hard is it to reword the sentence. If you wrote, "The Wash. monument stands ___ feet in the glorious skyline of DC," surely one should expect me to reword that to something like "The Washington Monument, built in __ to honor our first President..." I did all that in 15 seconds. If I found out something in your work that I didn't know and couldn't find consistently in other works, I should credit you.
Third, how hard is it to put a footnote or endnote in as the reference? Its the easiest thing in the world, and the failure to do so tells me the author is trying to get away with something. If he is sloppy about references like this, what else has he glossed over? Its as much a credibility issue as anything else.
Finally, who are you to decide what is and is not a "gem" of scholarship of an author? What may seem irrelevent today may take on a different meaning, particularly in the area of law, when a legal issue arises. There aren't any minor instances of plagarism. Though there are mistakes, and I would assert that a lot of these issues can be handled much better by someone saying, "I made a mistake. I'm sorry." Instead, they blame research assistants or argue that what they did wasn't dishonest.
As a consumer in the republic of ideas I and everyone else have the right to pass judgement every single day whether something is banal or signficant, and this is in fact a judgment that people make all of the time. Universities make it when they grant or deny tenure. Those who provide research grants make this judgement when they fund or deny a grant application. It is like every other free-market activity. And just like every other supposed "crime" people make a judgment about the importance of the item "filched," punishment, if any, etc. For instance I am not guilty of theft for availing myself of freely distributed literature, and virtually every definition of a property crime associates some threshold value below which it is a misdemeanor.
The problem is not that I am wrong, but that I am terribly right. You on the other hand would appear to be a trivial minded self-saitsfied pettifogging pandering academic trying to pass off snake oil trivialities as the genuine original thought and are a perfect example of the sort of academic that gets all in a huff about nothing that any normal person can understand.
Obviously since you think that nothing distinquishes important new ideas from trivial facts, you fail to understand the entire issue. An important original idea is a point of view that changes our whole way of looking at a problem, and presented in a scholarly manner would include the working out of that idea and presentation of the facts to support it. It is like the difference between lifting a sentence out of one of Einstein's papers on relativity in an exposition of relativity - without attribution - which sort of things happens all of the time in physics. And by the way everyone notices and noone says a word, because it is only an example chosen for illustration with no evidence that the author is trying to pass it off as original. It would be quite something else if someone tried to copy one of Einstein's papers and pass it off as his own.
But you see, even here you miss a point, which is that it is very difficult to make a career of passing off the really brilliant work of other people. There are so few genuinely creative people around that sooner or later people will figure out that you are not as smart as you say you are. Second, sooner or later, the genuine author of the ideas will come to light.
First, a book is nothing but ideas.
This statement proves that you don't understand what you are talking about. A well-written book isn't just a collection of ideas. It is an exposition of a theme through the systematic arrangement of argument supported by fact. There are lots of people who can write down lots of factual statements. Few can arrange all of the facts in a coherrent whole that anyone else will bother to read.
Make off with a cafeteria spoon or the crown jewels it is all the same. A crime is a crime. [/sarcasm] The lack of perspective among the snearing public here is a bit hard to take. Some self-inflated egomaniacal academic thinks that the only important thing Tribe had to say was the sentence Tribe stole from some-one else. In fact the reason that Tribe was probably careless about the point was that it just didn't matter very much to the thesis of Tribe's book - and believe me Tribe did not get tenure at Harvard Law School without producing important ideas that no one else produced (whether you like Tribe or not).
Harvard Education: what a joke. (on all the fools who pay the big bucks for it)
Oh for goodness sakes, obviously you were never a graduate student who had to do academic research. Your point is so far off the mark as to be laughable. Of course porfessors do their own research and develop their own ideas, but they also use graduate research assistants to review documents and try to find facts to support the point that you are trying to make. For instance, suppose a professor has in mind to challenge the commonly held belief that women in in England in the 13th century had no property rights (this is a real example from a book recently written by Norman Cantor). Having developed this research theme, it would not be unusual to have garduate students review records of court cases in various counties in England to determine how the law distributed property in various circumstances. Having graduate students help in the cumbersome process of reviewing these records and summarizing the cases is not demonstrative of lack of scholarship on the part of the professor. In fact it is part of the process of educating his graduate students on research methods.
What sometimes happens is that an uppity graduate student, not understanding his role in this will accuse the professor of plagiarism for writing a book "stealing his ideas" when the idea for the book and the principal research methods were already developed by the professor who applied for a research grant to get money to help suppor the graduate student in the first place.
No one is perfect and things go wrong, but that is not "sloppiness" or laxness or some sort of deriliction of duty on the part of the professor.
You got your dishonesty, and you got your leftists. Leftists argue "no absolute right/wrong." More than just a correlation there...
Rather than coming up with the thesis first, it is my understanding that the thesis should be derived from research and a body of evidence. Otherwise, and this is a real problem, one is promoting an agenda rather than being bringing order and meaning to a work. Excuse me, but I find your position laughable.
It is clear that you don't actually perform academic research. If you want to know a bit more about the procedure for developing a research topic, I would direct you to David Hackett Fischer's excellent book "Historian's Fallacies" where he describes in great detail the process of asking and answering questions through research.
To put it in a nutshell, no you are dead flat wrong. You don't start with reasearch. You start with general knowledge of a subject area, or an issue that has arrisen in and start asking questions about the subject for which you would like answers. Alternatively and frequently you already have the question from previous research on another subject. If you are a graduate student working for a good research professor, then he suggests the question that you should work on. You then start researching the answers, to develop empirical evidence to support the explanation or answer you would like to provide. Inevitably, the research will cause you to modify the question and perhaps ask additional questions, until you have a question, a thesis, or a hypothisis, that you can answer and suppor through evidence in the historical record, paleontological record, experimental record, or whatever.
What you don't do, unless you are a mind-numbingly boring dull grad-grind is go off an start doing undirected research in hopes of finding something. That almost always ends up going no where.
BTW, again, whatever you may think of Tribe, or Dershowitz, or any of a number of other Harvard or Yale or Stanford or U Chicago, or MIT professors they do not get their positions and reputation based on one sentence in a book perhaps stolen from someone else. At that level you get tenure for a many year record establishing that you have invented a whole new field of academic study that no one else invented, and the field broadly will recognize that you are the person who invented it, developed it, formed it, and lead it. The notion that any of the comes through plagiarism, is laughable ignorance.
"And wasn't Timothy Leary ("Tune in, turn on, drop out" and advocate of LSD) on the Harvard faculty?"
Indeed he was, a respected psychologist, who had done useful research on interpersonal relations. But that was before he started using acid and the world melted around his ears
>>As a consumer in the republic of ideas I and everyone else have the right to pass judgement every single day whether something is banal or signficant, and this is in fact a judgment that people make all of the time.<<
You are speaking of two different issues. The quality of an idea or of intellectual property has nothing to do with one's duty to credit the real author. Sure you have a right to pass judgment on just about anything. You don't have a right to steal someone's work and say it is, in your mind, trivial and therefore not wrong.
>>You on the other hand would appear to be a trivial minded self-saitsfied pettifogging pandering academic <<
That's what I appear to be, huh? I'm not sure what your definition of "academic" is, but I have never held an academic position. Only if I handled your case would I be a pettifogger.
>>Obviously since you think that nothing distinquishes important new ideas from trivial facts<<
If you would reread my post, you will find I made a distinction. Also, you will find how I explained that only a fool would cut and paste when it is just as easy to give credit or to rewrite where appropriate.
Please define what is trivial and what isn't in legal scholarship.
>>It is like the difference between lifting a sentence out of one of Einstein's papers on relativity in an exposition of relativity - without attribution - which sort of things happens all of the time in physics. And by the way everyone notices and noone says a word, because it is only an example chosen for illustration with no evidence that the author is trying to pass it off as original.<<
If the author isn't trying to pass it off as original, then it doesn't have any relevence to this situation. Tribe tried to pass the text off as original.
>>But you see, even here you miss a point, which is that it is very difficult to make a career of passing off the really brilliant work of other people. There are so few genuinely creative people around that sooner or later people will figure out that you are not as smart as you say you are. Second, sooner or later, the genuine author of the ideas will come to light.<<
First of all, this is intellectual snobbery, and I'm not sure your ready for that league. Second, you assume way too much based on what others "figure out." Are you trying to tell me that enough people will think that Tribe doesn't know what he's doing that he must lifted a specific passage of his work? C'mon, that's absurd. Finally, I strongly disagree with you that there are "few genuinely creative people." I know a lot of them.
>>This statement proves that you don't understand what you are talking about. A well-written book isn't just a collection of ideas. It is an exposition of a theme through the systematic arrangement of argument supported by fact.<<
I said a "book," not a "well-written book." Trying to make silly backhanded insults isn't helping your cause. Neither is saying something deserves protection based on your view of its quality.
I don't care to read Toni Morrison. However, some think Morrison is good author. I can't take the ideas expressed in those works, regardless of whether Morrison developed a quality theme through proper argumentation.
What Tribe did was wrong. Unless you can come up with a clear definition of trivial for all occassions and subjects, as well as proving your assertion that readers will essentially figure the source of the idea out, you are hard pressed to argue it is anything but wrong.
Martin Luther King plagiarized his dissertation. We now celebrate his birthday - rather than Abraham Lincoln's.
Stop acting like a cheap attorney and putting words in my mouth. That isn't what I argued.
Unless you can come up with a clear definition of trivial for all occasions and subjects
Either like many of your learned colleagues in robes you have also taken flight of any notion or understanding of common sense or else you are being pedantic about something you know far better about. The law is required every day to decide what is a trivial breach of an obligation or duty and what is a serious and actionable one.
For instance trespass is against the law. If I walk 100 yards into your property and chop down a tree you have substantial recourse. If I am walking across your front lawn, in the public right of way, an pick a flower off of a bush that is in the right of way, you have none.
Intellectual property is much the same way. It is very different if I purloin a significant, and in some sense profitable idea that was clearly yours, and pick one that turns out to have been yours, but was pretty much in the public domain and is of really no special value. Were this not the case, every time one of us writes a letter, without footnotes, we would be at risk for our fortunes and liberties to anyone who came along and could claim that a word, phrase, idea or sentence was actually stolen from them.
But you are a clever attorney, know all of this, and are just being argumentative. I would like to think that you are an intellectual property attorney trying to defend a system that has become so convoluted as to be almost indefensible, but that would be leaping to a conclusion without substantive fact.
As a practitioner of a profession that makes a lucrative practice of filching ideas and arugments from other people I think you should get down off of your high-horse. Almost any time an attorney files a pleading or a brief, he/she swipes formats and legal arguments from colleagues and from those who have come before you - without attribution for the most part. In fact, if attorneys ever did a lot of really original legal research in pleading a case - I mean what would pass for original research in a scholarly field - no one could afford an attorney at all.
>>It is very different if I purloin a significant, and in some sense profitable idea that was clearly yours, and pick one that turns out to have been yours, but was pretty much in the public domain and is of really no special value. Were this not the case, every time one of us writes a letter, without footnotes, we would be at risk for our fortunes and liberties to anyone who came along and could claim that a word, phrase, idea or sentence was actually stolen from them.<<
This is not only wrong, it is silly. Again, you are trying to evaluate ideas, and what are you basing that evaluation on? I have no interest in, for example, sociology scholarship, so it has no special value to me. If I can objectively determine a passage in sociological scholarship has no profitability, can I lift it and claim it as my own? The answer is, of course, no, but to read your statement one could assume you are indifferent to that. The business about "word pharse idea..." is not only irrelevent (a sentence lifted is not what is at issue here), but also ignores my point about the author either being too lazy to rewrite the passage or to footnote it. You still haven't answered that point.
Please explain how any of my arguments are indicative of me acting like a "cheap attorney."
While you are correct that I lift passages from other pleadings all the time (mostly ones I've already drafted, but in other cases from both other's work and reported cases), all this material is 1) in the public domain by definition; 2) paid for an on behalf of a client, not something I pass off as my own.
How do you define "original research?" As far as I'm concerned, I do far more "original research" than virtually any academic. I interview clients, I depose witnesses, I field test arguments in court in hearings and in trials, I investigate jurors, and I get information from those jurors after a case.
If you are speaking of "original research" for legal scholarship in the forms of asking judges or parties about a particular case, i.e., interview the judges and ask why did you write the opinion the way you did or interview the attorneys or parties and query about a particular stratagy, the reason is that it has little or no scholarship value. Law review articles are "secondary sources" themselves that have marginal authority in a court case. In court, authority is king, and it is virtually the entire bases of the law. In other words, the only value a law review article has, outside of getting professors tenure, is to the practitioner. The court won't accept an "interview" from an attorney or party as any authority; you have to be a witness to the events or an expert to offer any factual information on a case, and as far as legal issues are concerned, the court isn't interested exactly HOW a previous case was handed down, only what they did with a certain set of facts. Essentially, such "original research" is useless.
If I'm writing an article for the Journal of Finance and Economics for example, I gather a data set, run regressions, perform mathematical analyses and computations, then write and try to explain something. This may or may not be of any use for practitioners, but the focus is totally different.
How about just plain oversight on an issue that just didn't matter very much?
Again, you are trying to evaluate ideas, and what are you basing that evaluation on?
The judgment of the academic peers of the community of pracice - pretty much the same standard that exists whenever you litigate damages on any subject.
Ah well, now I understand. You don't and it is shear ignorance for you to think that you do.
>>How about just plain oversight on an issue that just didn't matter very much?<<
You're either kidding yourself or you don't understand the argument.
>>The judgment of the academic peers of the community of pracice - pretty much the same standard that exists whenever you litigate damages on any subject.<<
For the second time, that's fine, but judging ideas differs from stealing them and certainly isn't a justification for it. Fair use protects me copying someone's literature if I'm using it for a purpose like refuting it. Fair use does not protect what Tribe did, nor should it.
>>Ah well, now I understand. You don't and it is shear ignorance for you to think that you do.<<
This statement is just stupid. I do know what academics do. I did research assistance as an undergraduate. I know for a fact I work longer and harder, and I've got the timesheets to prove it. Academics don't.
If you continue to differ, I wish yu would post what I know, do, etc., and how you know that. Then post what an academic does, how you know that, and compare the two.
For the life of me, I can't believe you are trying to justify an argument that is so clearly wrong. But whatever.
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