Lost Tribe

Wowsers. The Weekly Standard’s Joseph Bottum, fresh from his denunciations of Charles Ogletree, now charges no less a figure than Laurence Tribe with plaigarism over the incessant repetition of identical or similar phrases from Henry J. Abraham’s 1974 book Justices and Presidents in Tribe’s 1985 book God Save This Honorable Court – a popular work, with no footnotes, which Bottum suggests was rushed into print to provide intellectual ammunition to otherwise unarmed Senate Democrats bracing for attacks on Reagan appointees to the Supreme Court (an effort that bore fruit in the Bork hearings in 1987). Go read Bottum’s whole article and judge for yourself.
I actually worked for Tribe briefly my third year of law school, as part of an army of research assistants who summarized Supreme Court cases – every Supreme Court case for several recent years, between us – for a revision of Tribe’s American Constitutional Law treatise. Tribe isn’t the kind of guy to plaigarise out of a lack of ability to do independent work; as Bottum suggests, the trap for people like Tribe is more the temptation to be inhumanly prolific.

One thought on “Lost Tribe”

  1. Nice quote about “the temptation to be inhumanly prolific.” We’re sure to use it in a future update of our news summaries. Previously we used e-mail, but we now have a blog up summarizing the news coverage of the four Harvard scholars who have been accused of plagiarism or other scholarly misconduct in the past two years, including most recently Professor Tribe: https://authorskeptics.blogspot.com. Comments via e-mail from you or your readers are always welcome.
    AuthorSkeptics@hotmail.com

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