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Neil Gorsuch Accused of Plagiarism Days Before Confirmation Vote

Harshaw said:
Wow. You didn't even read your own article, did you? The woman he supposedly "plagiarized" said there was no such thing:



Never mind everything else that others have posted which debunk the accusation. For you to blithely declare the accusation "true" after all of that is . . . wow.
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And others point out that it exceeds the requirements for plagiarism.
 
RAMOSS said:
Why, the accusation is true. There is also evidence of patchwork quotes from other sources too. It could be just sloppy work.
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If it is only a publication and not an academic thesis, I am not sure that anything undue happened.
 
RAMOSS said:
And others point out that it exceeds the requirements for plagiarism.
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A few did. Most didn't. At BEST for you, you have a an ambiguous case, but you're plowing full steam ahead calling it "true" in the face of significant doubt.

Obviously, because you WANT it to be true. Why else would you?
 
Harshaw said:
A few did. Most didn't. At BEST for you, you have a an ambiguous case, but you're plowing full steam ahead calling it "true" in the face of significant doubt.

Obviously, because you WANT it to be true. Why else would you?
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No, not ambiguous at all.
 
nota bene said:
From National Review:

Surprise, surprise. Another desperate 11th-hour smear, something that appears to have become a rite of passage for Republican Supreme Court nominees. Someone (David Brock, call your office?) is shopping around to news outlets baseless claims that Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch committed acts of plagiarism in four passages in his 2006 book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. Multiple academics who have reviewed the charges—including one of Gorsuch’s imagined victims—have rejected those claims, which, they explain, rest on a misunderstanding of academic citation standards and don’t involve misappropriation of anyone’s ideas, theories, or creative expressions.

Read more at: Phony Plagiarism Charges Gorsuch | National Review
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Your source has the journalistic integrity of wet toilet paper. It reduces the actual criticism by only picking two passages. It cherry picks which "expert" academics it hears from.

This alone: "Surprise, surprise. Another desperate 11th-hour smear, something that appears to have become a rite of passage for Republican Supreme Court nominees." isn't even fit for a respectable blog.
 
One last gasp, smear job.................... #failbigtime!


The American Bar Association declared Judge Neil Gorsuch “well-qualified” to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday, giving President Donald Trump’s pick to succeed the late Antonin Scalia the group’s highest rating.

The bar association’s standing committee on the federal judiciary reached its decision unanimously, according to Nancy Scott Degan, the group’s chair.
 
Fiddytree said:
The funny thing is I've actually read some of the material people are getting all up in arms about not being cited. At the very least, this should tell people to read the content Gorsuch was wrestling with.

From what I was gathering, citation standards in his line of work have to do with citing an individual if there's some different conclusions about. Perhaps Turtle could enlighten further.

Sent from my LG-H910 using Tapatalk
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It's not really a big deal because the narrative structure that he clearly stole isn't really part of his argument. I like the bloomberg piece on it:

There’s no doubt that in at least one extended passage, Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, copied wording from an article in the Indiana Law Journal with only trivial changes and without citing the article. There’s even a footnote that’s replicated verbatim from the article, down to the exact same use of ellipses in citing a pediatrics textbook. In academic settings, this would be considered plagiarism, albeit of a fairly minor kind. And the citation of the textbook -- a primary source -- while failing to cite the article -- a secondary source -- implies knowing borrowing, rather than an accident.

Yet it’s also true, as Gorsuch’s defenders are insisting, that the unattributed borrowing seems to consist only of the presentation of rather dry facts -- and not any argument or original idea borrowed without attribution, which would be heavy-duty plagiarism. The defenders are also right that this sort of paraphrase is actually fairly common in judicial opinions and even some legal academic writing. It’s poor form not to cite a secondary source from which you’ve mined primary sources. But it’s also not the end of the world, or a profound violation of the sort that would call Gorsuch’s integrity or judgment into question.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-05/gorsuch-s-plagiarism-is-worthy-of-embarrassment
 
nota bene said:
From National Review:

Surprise, surprise. Another desperate 11th-hour smear, something that appears to have become a rite of passage for Republican Supreme Court nominees. Someone (David Brock, call your office?) is shopping around to news outlets baseless claims that Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch committed acts of plagiarism in four passages in his 2006 book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. Multiple academics who have reviewed the charges—including one of Gorsuch’s imagined victims—have rejected those claims, which, they explain, rest on a misunderstanding of academic citation standards and don’t involve misappropriation of anyone’s ideas, theories, or creative expressions.

Read more at: Phony Plagiarism Charges Gorsuch | National Review
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In other words, this 11th hour "revelation" is just bull**** on toast? Big surprise.
 
Beaudreaux said:
I agree completely, however it doesn't appear that this will apply to Judge Gorsuch regarding the allegations in the OP. From the information described in the linked article in Post 5 of this thread, and provided again here for you to click on and read, it seems more than likely that the charges of plagiarism against Gorsuch are not valid, and have in fact been debunked pretty effectively.
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I am not convinced by that article. It is basically a group of people with an interest in protecting Gorsuch or the integrity of the article along with an unsubstantiated claim that some tradition does not require him to source properly.
 
This from LawNews.com:

Gorsuch Accused of Plagiarism Despite Original Author Saying He Didn’t Do It

On to the next phony smear and fake outrage.

edit: also, there's this quote from the Washington Post: "He also did not cite the Indiana Law Journal article itself, but rather the same primary sources that the Indiana Law Journal cited: a court case, books on pediatrics and a newspaper article."
 
Absentglare said:
It's not really a big deal because the narrative structure that he clearly stole isn't really part of his argument. I like the bloomberg piece on it:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-05/gorsuch-s-plagiarism-is-worthy-of-embarrassment
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I've already said it's not a big deal to me, but the defense presented isn't very persuasive either. A literal Copy/Paste, which is what Gorsuch did in several cases, is never OK, and the excuse that the author he failed to cite was secondary, not primary, is nonsense. As the Bloomberg author indicates, accumulating those primary sources is a lot of work, and a simple FN acknowledging it is appropriate and ethically necessary. If you're not stealing their ideas, you're 'just' stealing their work, without what amounts to a thanks, here's a tip of my hat for your effort. At least that much is required, as are quotations when an author does the copy/paste routine, no matter the subject.

Anyway, again, not a biggee in the big picture, but a better defense is 'Yeah, he screwed up, it is obvious plagiarism, but this isn't a pattern, no big deal.' That is sort of where that Bloomberg author ended up, but he was pretty wishy washy about the whole thing.
 
JasperL said:
I've already said it's not a big deal to me, but the defense presented isn't very persuasive either. A literal Copy/Paste, which is what Gorsuch did in several cases, is never OK, and the excuse that the author he failed to cite was secondary, not primary, is nonsense. As the Bloomberg author indicates, accumulating those primary sources is a lot of work, and a simple FN acknowledging it is appropriate and ethically necessary. If you're not stealing their ideas, you're 'just' stealing their work, without what amounts to a thanks, here's a tip of my hat for your effort. At least that much is required, as are quotations when an author does the copy/paste routine, no matter the subject.
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It's not the standard for that type of work to cite the secondary sources.
 
nota bene said:
From National Review:

Surprise, surprise. Another desperate 11th-hour smear, something that appears to have become a rite of passage for Republican Supreme Court nominees. Someone (David Brock, call your office?) is shopping around to news outlets baseless claims that Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch committed acts of plagiarism in four passages in his 2006 book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. Multiple academics who have reviewed the charges—including one of Gorsuch’s imagined victims—have rejected those claims which, they explain, rest on a misunderstanding of academic citation standards and don’t involve misappropriation of anyone’s ideas, theories, or creative expressions.

Read more at: Phony Plagiarism Charges Gorsuch | National Review
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But...wouldn't a victim of suicide or euthanisa be, you know...dead?
 
Harshaw said:
It's not the standard for that type of work to cite the secondary sources.
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Uhhh, it is when you copy and paste them, with the exact same diction, punctuation, formatting, and idea.

Why must you lie?
 
Harshaw said:
It's not the standard for that type of work to cite the secondary sources.
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Citation to a publishing manual, ethical guidelines for legal writing, or whatever written standards govern this kind of thing?

And saying - no need to cite 'secondary sources' - isn't really the point here. He did the literal copy/paste routine, which is at least theft of someone's work, if not their ideas (assembling primary sources into an argument is itself original scholarship in many cases) and I find it impossible to believe there is any standard at any level of writing and publishing that accepts copy/paste => not even an ACKNOWLEDGMENT is appropriate. That's 'plagiarism' on a personal blog....
 
Moot said:
But...wouldn't a victim of suicide or euthanisa be, you know...dead?
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*looks at everyone*

Should we tell her?
 
sangha said:
I am not convinced by that article. It is basically a group of people with an interest in protecting Gorsuch or the integrity of the article along with an unsubstantiated claim that some tradition does not require him to source properly.
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The way I read it, he did source properly and gave credit where required. Out of laziness, I'll just refer you to Zeph's post that summarizes it very well - https://www.debatepolitics.com/breaking-news-non-msm/283016-neil-gorsuch-accused-plagiarism-days-before-confirmation-vote-post1067064387.html#post1067064387
 
JasperL said:
Citation to a publishing manual, ethical guidelines for legal writing, or whatever written standards govern this kind of thing?
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According to professors who have weighed in on it, as cited in the articles provided in this thread. :shrug:
 
Beaudreaux said:
The way I read it, he did source properly and gave credit where required. Out of laziness, I'll just refer you to Zeph's post that summarizes it very well - https://www.debatepolitics.com/breaking-news-non-msm/283016-neil-gorsuch-accused-plagiarism-days-before-confirmation-vote-post1067064387.html#post1067064387
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He really didn't. The Bloomberg author that Absentglare refers to above cites an example where he literally did a copy/paste of an entire footnote, right down to the ellipticals and the spacing. That's just inappropriate for any level of serious scholarship, and even for casual writing. It is theft of a person's work without even an acknowledgment of that work. We aren't allowed to do that on HERE for goodness sake.

At any rate if someone wants to argue that literally copying and pasting entire sections is acceptable under some standard, I want to see that standard, in writing. I'm sure no one can produce it.
 
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