The Little Book of Plagiarism

The Little Book of Plagiarism Richard A. Posner. New York: Pantheon Books, 2007. An index to our times is America's obsession with celebrity whores and celebrity plagiarists, many of whom are forgiven for their transgressions in a country that has lost its moral bearings. Toward the end of his life the late Stephen Ambrose was nailed for plagiarism, for example, but his reputation was hardly damaged. Few critics would slam at the end of his career, the popular historian who had helped to define the "greatest generation." Doris Kearns Goodwin, a sweetheart on the TV talk circuit, was also nailed, but still appears frequently as a Presidential pundit on the Sunday network television talk shows. Highly paid cutie-pie TV anchor Katie Couric was said to have been "horrified" over her transgression, which should have been obviously not a first-person account of "her" first trip to the library, reported from plagiarized copy (apparently prepared by a subordinate) taken from The Wall Street Journal in the spring of 2007. By May of 2007 Couric's ratings were in the toilet, not because she had unwittingly plagiarized, but because she could not compete with more seasoned journalists to anchor the network news. Regardless, as noted above, celebrity plagiarists commonly thrive on television. In 1998, for example, Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle allegedly stole jokes from a book written by comedian George Carlin, following accusations in 1992 from Chicago columnist Mike Royko that Barnicle had plagiarized at least two of his Chicago Tribune columns. His punishment? After being suspended from the Globe, Barnicle went on to become a regular for Chris Matthews on the MSNBC blowhard gabfest show, Hardball} In 2006 British novelist Ian McEwan was accused of having "copied" the words of another author for his Booker Prize-nominated novel, ironically entitled Atonement. McEwan admitted that he found the hospital descriptions of Lucilla Andrews "painstakingly accurate," but denied having plagiarized her autobiography. So, if some of our most successful journalists and writers plagiarize, how can the practice be deplorable? With the rise of the Internet, moreover, the offense has been multiplied exponentially. Meanwhile, the American Historical Association threw up its metaphorical hands in frustration in 2003 after the Ambrose and Goodwin affairs and abolished its practice of adjudication.2 Individual historians responded, however, to what some regarded as a "global meltdown of standards," in the words of one reviewer.3 Peter Charles Hoffer of the University of Georgia and a member of the American Historical Associations professional division established by the AHA to audit professional standards for academic historians, undertook a book-length consideration of the problem in 2004, appropriately entitled Past Imperfect. But the problem is endemic and crosses disciplines. Late in 2004, for example, two prominent law professors at Harvard University admitted to having "unintentionally misused sources," constitutional law authority Laurence H. Tribe and Charles J. Ogletree Jr.4 Which brings us to Richard A. Posner of the University of Chicago Law School, who also serves as a judge for the United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and who is no doubt knowledgeable enough to have written a Big Book of Plagiarism, rather than a "little" one. As a lawyer, Judge Posner is interested in intellectual property, and in fact has published on the topic. He is also interested in copyright issues, and in the problems of the alleged Harvard plagiarists mentioned above but notes that plagiarism is probably no "more common at Harvard than elsewhere" (7). Moreover, he advises, although celebrity plagiarists get most of the attention, most plagiarists are obscure, "in fact, most are students" (8). Posner is fascinated by the "ambiguity of the concept." The word "plagiarism" dates to the seventeenth century, when Robert Greene accused that century's most famous poet of plagiarism. …