Is Judge Gorsuch a plagarist?
WASHINGTON — A short section in Judge Neil Gorsuch’s 2006 book appears to copy — at times word-for-word — from a 1984 law review article by a lawyer in Indiana. Other sections of his book that were reviewed by BuzzFeed News contain additional apparent attribution errors.
President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, whose nomination is being considered by the full Senate this week, has been an appellate judge for more than a decade. In all that time, he has been praised for his writing and has never been accused of plagiarism in his more than 200 opinions on the bench.
The section at issue in his book, The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, is a brief one: It is a summary of the facts and ruling in the 1982 case of Baby Doe, a baby born in Indiana with Down syndrome. It takes up only two paragraphs and seven endnotes in a book that covers more than 300 pages, including endnotes. The book came out of his 2004 Doctor of Philosophy dissertation from the University of Oxford.
The section, however, repeats language and sourcing from another work — Abigail Lawlis Kuzma’s 1984 Indiana Law Journal article, “The Legislative Response to Infant Doe.”
He went to Harvard. He knows not to do this.
