Prof. Kingsfield Is Very, Very Disappointed

...which is an obscure way of saying they caught another Harvard Law School professor plagiarizing. The Boston Globe reports on the Weekly Standard's revelations that Laurence Tribe lifted some material from Henry Abraham, which build on the kerfuffle caused earlier this month by similar transgressions on the part of Tribe's colleagues Charles Ogletree. Meanwhile, Alan Dershowitz--no stranger to plagiarism accusations--says the conservative Standard just wants to take a liberal constitutional law expert down a peg...and, anyway, it's not these guys' fault, since (in the reporter's words) "law and academia sometimes have different standards, and Harvard Law School would benefit from establishing a committee to lay out clear guidelines on attribution and the use of assistants."

I don't know; I was always under the impression that Harvard Law School profs, even though they have one foot in what Dershowitz calls "a culture of judges and lawyers relying on the work of assistants," probably got sufficient education about the wrongness of plagiarism the first day of freshman year, just like everybody else--as the Harvard Crimson notes. (Thanks to Publisher's Lunch for the pointers.)