I Swear, I Didn't Go to Harvard

As noted two weeks ago, one of my former professors at Harvard Law has been accused of plagarism. This isn't exactly shocking nowadays, since plagarism seems to be discovered with some regularity among many scholarly authors, but it is depressing. It's even more depressing when another HLS professor gets accused of the same thing.

I never had Larry Tribe for class, although I sat in on a couple of his classes for the experience of hearing from one of the foremost scholars of Constitutional Law (friends will note that this is a surprising admission, since I rarely attended classes in which I was actually enrolled). But Tribe's about as big a name as there is in Constitutional Law, and his book God Save This Honorable Court is the Bible for liberals who seek to keep conservative judges off the high court. If it is plagarized, that's shocking; as Powerline noted, his current problems may also relate strongly to those of another big-name liberal...

There are indications that Tribe's book may, in fact, have been written largely by others, especially Ronald Klain, who went on to become Vice-President Al Gore's chief of staff, but at the time was only a first year law student. I don't know, of course, what caused Tribe's apparent plagiarism. But my guess is that two forces were at work.

The first is the fact that a famous scholar can ultimately turn into a brand. Larry Tribe's Harvard biography says that he has published more than 100 books and articles. Realistically, this is more work (along with everything else the prolific Prof. Tribe does) than one man can possibly accomplish. Inevitably, he must have come to depend on law students and other assistants for much of the research and writing that has gone into has books.

The second element, I suspect, is that Tribe regarded God Save This Honorable Court as politics, not scholarship--much as Dan Rather knew that his National Guard story was politics, not journalism. I don't believe that Larry would deliberately commit plagiarism. But I do believe that when a book is written not as a serious work of scholarship, but as a popularized tract intended to influence a political debate, it is not surprising that the author's editorial standards may slip. The overriding criterion by which a book like Honorable Court is judged is neither truth nor originality, but political impact. Once a scholar starts down that path, plagiarism is, perhaps, the least of the pitfalls to which he is subject.

Political impact as the measuring stick would also be a good excuse why CBS and Dan Rather raced out with the memos at the center of Rathergate. But it's not an excuse for shoddy journalism, or in Tribe's case, shoddy scholarship. Hopefully, Tribe can explain the discrepancies. But if he can't, here's hoping he doesn't try the Rather-Nixon defense.