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washingtonpost.com

BIDEN ADMITS PLAGIARIZING IN LAW SCHOOL
By Paul Taylor
September 18, 1987

An emotional Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) yesterday acknowledged he had plagiarized in a paper he submitted while a first-year law student in 1965, but defended his integrity and vowed to remain a candidate for his party’s presidential nomination.

“I did something very stupid 23 years ago,” Biden, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said at a crowded news conference he convened to try to dispose of burgeoning charges of plagiarism — past and present — that have threatened his candidacy.

He said his 1965 “mistake” was neither intentional nor “malevolent,” noted that the faculty of the Syracuse University Law School had allowed him to repeat the course — after initially flunking him for lifting without citation five pages from a published law review, and said that his dean later vouched for his high character. “If anyone tells you Joe Biden isn’t a straight arrow, I’d be very surprised,” Biden said.

He also dismissed as “much ado about nothing” charges that in his stump speeches this year, he has used — word for word and without attribution — passages from other politicians.

Biden said he rarely failed to attribute and that these “mistakes” were born either of inadvertency or ignorance. He added, “In the marketplace of ideas in the political realm, the notion that for every thought or idea you have to go back and find and attribute to someone is frankly ludicrous.”

The flap unfolded at the worst possible time for Biden, throwing his campaign into crisis just as he began introducing himself to the nation as chairman of the committee conducting the televised hearings on confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork.

He said the timing of the leaks to the news media was “no coincidence” but declined to point fingers at any specific opponent. Meantime, the political community was busy yesterday playing a kind of “whodunit,” trying to figure out which of Biden’s Democratic rivals or which Republican interested in discrediting him in the midst of the hearings was the source of the leaks.

Biden, 44, has never been bashful about showing emotion. And his demeanor at the 35-minute news conference shifted from contrition and defensiveness to take-me-as-I-am defiance. “I’ve done some dumb things, and I’ll do some dumb things again,” he said at the beginning. He ended it: “I’m in this race to stay. I’m in this race to win. And here I come.”

Biden’s supporters said afterward that they think he contained the damage. “Are we only going to allow people who have never made a mistake to run for president?” asked Lowell Junkins, a 1986 Democratic candidate for governor in Iowa and cochairman of Biden’s campaign in that key state.

“We’ve all flunked a test,” he continued. “We’ve all failed to be above average on occasions. I think Amercia is going to relate to Joe Biden because he’s an average person . . . . Being an average person means that sometimes you do things below average, and you sometimes do things above average.”

“We’re battle-scarred, battle-tested and ready to do battle,” said Biden’s press secretary, Larry Rasky. “His deepest dark secret is out, and it was a term paper in his first semester in law school and it ain’t a big deal.”

While describing the law school incident, Biden released a stack of documents that contained correspondence on the episode, as well as law school and undergraduate transcripts.

The record showed that in a meeting on Dec. 1, 1965, the law school faculty found that Biden had, “without quotation or citation,” lifted five pages from a published law review article and used them in his 15-page paper for a legal-methods course.

The faculty recommended that he receive an “F” for the course and be allowed to repeat it the following year. (Biden did repeat, receiving an 80). Law School Dean Ralph Kharas said in the memo that if Biden’s record was clear from that point on, he would state that the incident should not stand in his way to his being admitted to the bar. Three years later, Kharas’ successor, Robert W. Miller, wrote a letter to the Delaware Board of Bar Examiners stating that Biden’s records “reflect nothing whatsoever of a derogatory nature.”

But as the incident was initially being adjudicated by the faculty in 1965, Biden clearly felt in danger of expulsion. In a letter to the dean and faculty, he explained he did not think it was “possible to plagiarize” the legal memorandum because he was “under the misguided understanding” that the sole purpose of the assignment was to demonstrate an understanding of the form of legal writing and provide a critic with source materials to consider.

He concluded his appeal: “I am aware that, in many instances, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Consequently, if you decide that this is such an instance and that I’ve broken the law, then any course of action on your part is justified. But please, I implore you, don’t take my honor. If your decision is that I may not remain at Syracuse University College of Law, please allow me to resign, but don’t label me a cheat.”

Biden’s instructor in the legal methods course, David Yaffee, recalled yesterday that he had been “disturbed” by the incident and that he had never had a similar one in five or six years of teaching the course. But he added: “I was not unhappy with the outcome of the faculty meeting. They felt he was a very foolish young man, and he was scared silly.”

Biden said jokingly yesterday that his greatest embarrassment was that his sons were going to find out the mediocrity of his academic record. He said he finished 76th in a class of 86 or 87 at Syracuse, adding, “I hated law school.”

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