As My Harvard Law Degree Continues to Depreciate...

The esteemed Lawrence Tribe, one of the most respected constitutional law scholars in the world (in addition to being a professor at Harvard Law), gets accused of plagarism, as we noted yesterday. In an article in today's Harvard Crimson, Tribe admits via e-mail that he made a mistake, and takes personal responsibility for it (hat tip: Powerline). Tribe used language in his 1985 book, God Save This Honorable Court, that mirrored language from Henry Abreaham's 1974 book, Justices and Presidents, including one verbatim quote. Tribe's book featured no footnotes -- a conscious decision -- and only had a single sentence mentioning Abraham's work as background literature.

Tribe deserve full credit for having the decency and sense of personal honor to step forward and take some well-deserved blame. He may not have actually been responsible for what took place -- but the buck stops with him, because his name is on the book.

What's appalling is the reaction by some of his best-known colleagues. Check out the comments from Alan Dershowitz and Charles Ogletree, both of whom have suffered through allegations of plagarism as well...

Ogletree, speaking to The Crimson yesterday, dismissed The Standard’s allegations against Tribe as “nonsense.”

“I think Larry [Tribe] may be overreacting,” Dershowitz said yesterday, when asked whether Tribe was right to apologize. “Abraham sat on this story for 20 years. If he had a gripe, he should have written to Larry 20 years ago.”

Abraham told The Standard last week that Tribe’s failure to credit his sources did not come as a surprise.

“I was aware of what Tribe was doing when I first read his book,” Abraham told The Standard. “But I chose not to do anything at the time. I’ve never confronted him—and I was wrong in not following it up. I should have done something about it.”

Abraham told The Standard that Tribe is “a big mahatma and thinks he can get away with this sort of thing.”

...Dershowitz said yesterday that The Standard’s charges against Tribe were politically motivated.

“Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime,” Dershowitz said—a quotation he attributed to Soviet spymaster Lavrenti Beria. “Clearly someone was looking to pin something on the most prominent liberal constitutional scholar in the country.”

Tribe joined the Harvard Law faculty in 1968 and quickly entered the spotlight as an eloquent advocate for liberal causes. He has argued three dozen cases in front of the Supreme Court—famously representing Vice President Albert J. Gore Jr. ’69 in the December 2000 Florida recount dispute.

Dershowitz said that Tribe’s 1985 book was an effective element of “the Democratic arsenal” as liberals tried to block Ronald Reagan’s right-wing judicial nominations.

“It worked, and the Right has been pissed at Tribe ever since,” said Dershowitz.

Dershowitz called yesterday for stricter University guidelines on source citations and the use of research assistants so that scholars could avoid ideologically motivated charges of plagiarism in the future.

Harvard’s Writing With Sources manual, which is distributed to all undergraduates when they enter as freshmen, offers a crystal-clear definition of plagiarism: “passing off a source’s information, ideas, or words as your own by omitting to cite them; an act of lying, cheating, and stealing.”

But Dershowitz said guidelines in the legal profession are murkier.

He said that judges frequently rely on lawyers’ briefs and clerks’ memoranda in drafting opinions. This results in a “cultural difference” between sourcing in the legal profession and other academic disciplines, Dershowitz said.

Okay, I'm unbelieveably embarassed.

I went to a law school where Dersh is a professor. He's an exceedingly nice guy, and is often willing to take on unpopular causes, even when they disagree with his own point of view. And he's a damn fine lawyer.

But the quotes in the article above are a great example of why people hate lawyers. If you ask a layman to define plagarism, he'd tell you that it involves copying someone else's work and passing it off as your own. That's exactly what Tribe did.

Yet Dershowitz seems to think lawyers should be held to another, lower standard, because of the nature of our profession. What a load of hooey. Look, if you're copying from another source, give it attribution. You learn that as an undergrad, before you hit law school. Heck, some of us even learn it in high school. There's no cultural difference for lawyers that allows you to quote another source verbatim in a written work and claim it as your own.

On top of that, we're supposed to question the substance of the charge because of the motivation behind it. I'll stipulate that The Weekly Standard is a conservative news magazine. So what? If the substance of the charge is right, then the claim of bias is irrelevant. Again, answer the substance of the charge (as Tribe did) instead of whining about who's accusing you (as Dan Rather did).

Does it matter if someone with a partisan bent wants to take Tribe down? Not really. Tribe's the one who made the mistake, so he will suffer the consequences. At least he's willing to live up to it. Maybe he could teach a lesson to Alan Dershowitz at the same time.