Tribe’s plagiarism

Harvard law professor Larry Tribe stands accused of plagiarism, and he acknowledges it and says that he takes responsibility for it. But his colleagues are reacting less than responsibly, in ways reminiscent of Dan Rather’s recent disgraceful behavior. Power Line has a summary.

UPDATE (07:30 28-Sep-2004): David Frum, himself a Harvard Law School graduate, says that there is some truth to Alan Dershowitz’s defense of Tribe: there is a ‘cultural difference’ between sourcing in the legal profession and other academic disciplines. Frum also notes that Harvard Law School’s scholarship is rather thin compared to other disciplines:

Law schools – and Harvard perhaps more than any other - suffer from a deep identity problem. They regard themselves and hold themselves out to the public as scholarly institutions, just like the other graduate departments of the university. Yet most of the faculty of the Harvard law school when I was there were not scholars at all. They were extremely clever lawyers who had been hired young for their intellectual potential – and who were then valued by the school for their charisma, their teaching ability, and their activist outside legal work. The only scholarship that was usually required of them – scholarship meaning original academic research and writing – was a single substantial article for a law review. A bright young man or woman could get tenure at Harvard Law School with a publishing record that would not even qualify him for a job interview at the Harvard History Department.

There were exceptions to this rule, of course, and ironically enough Tribe was and is one of them. But Dershowitz is correct that most Harvard lawyers simply play by different rules than other academics do.

Yet this is not an excuse. It is a restatement of the problem.