Wendy Kaminer: Plagiarism, according to Judge Richard Posner
[Wendy Kaminer, a lawyer and writer, is the author most recently of Free for All: Defending Liberty in America Today (2002).]
Plagiarism, like infidelity, is a habit that few defend but many indulge. You can discern its frequency and covert acceptability in the ready excuses offered by and on behalf of eminent writers and professors periodically caught copying the work of less eminent writers or research assistants. Consider the group of famous novelists who rushed to defend British writer Ian McEwan for borrowing sentences from a memoir by the late Lucilla Andrews in his best- selling novel Atonement. McEwan and his advo cates stressed that he had acknowl edged a general debt to Andrews, and they asserted that fiction writers have creative license to borrow and embellish, especially when writing historical fiction. That principle is not terribly controversial, but it may not apply in this case. As Slate media columnist Jack Schafer suggested, while McEwan said he creatively embellished, others might fairly say he copied.
Nonfiction writers and scholars charged with plagiarism are less likely to claim a license to copy than to cop to a lesser offense, such as disorganization. They acknowledge the inadvertent omission of footnotes and quotation marks, or blame their own inade quate notes for leading them to mistake other people’s words for their own, while vigorously denying that any of these “mistakes” might constitute plagiarism. This effectively defines plagiarism to exclude even gross or implausible acts of negligence, especially when committed by established writers or scholars presumed by their friends to have no need to plagiarize. As Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe asserted in defense of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin after the first revelation of her borrowings in 2002 (others followed), Goodwin had merely been “slop py with her sources in a minuscule part of her truly extraordinary body of work a dec ade and a half ago.” A few years later, Tribe himself was exposed as a borrower; he apologized, blaming his “well- meaning effort” to write a book for a lay audience that was free of footnotes.
In The Little Book of Plagiarism, Richard Posner observes that plagiarism is not “especially heinous” but “embarrassingly second rate,” which partly explains why officially first- rate writers caught copying seem to regard plagiarism as a crime that other people commit. Posner, a federal appellate court judge, lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, and author of an impressive array of big books as well as little ones, offers an idiosyncratic primer on plagiarism and intellectual property, combining bytes of history, law, and cultural analysis in an essay of about 100 pages. The book’s conclusion seems rushed and perfunctory, but this is an otherwise enjoyable “Cook’s tour.”...
Read entire article at Wilson Quarterly (spring)
Plagiarism, like infidelity, is a habit that few defend but many indulge. You can discern its frequency and covert acceptability in the ready excuses offered by and on behalf of eminent writers and professors periodically caught copying the work of less eminent writers or research assistants. Consider the group of famous novelists who rushed to defend British writer Ian McEwan for borrowing sentences from a memoir by the late Lucilla Andrews in his best- selling novel Atonement. McEwan and his advo cates stressed that he had acknowl edged a general debt to Andrews, and they asserted that fiction writers have creative license to borrow and embellish, especially when writing historical fiction. That principle is not terribly controversial, but it may not apply in this case. As Slate media columnist Jack Schafer suggested, while McEwan said he creatively embellished, others might fairly say he copied.
Nonfiction writers and scholars charged with plagiarism are less likely to claim a license to copy than to cop to a lesser offense, such as disorganization. They acknowledge the inadvertent omission of footnotes and quotation marks, or blame their own inade quate notes for leading them to mistake other people’s words for their own, while vigorously denying that any of these “mistakes” might constitute plagiarism. This effectively defines plagiarism to exclude even gross or implausible acts of negligence, especially when committed by established writers or scholars presumed by their friends to have no need to plagiarize. As Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe asserted in defense of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin after the first revelation of her borrowings in 2002 (others followed), Goodwin had merely been “slop py with her sources in a minuscule part of her truly extraordinary body of work a dec ade and a half ago.” A few years later, Tribe himself was exposed as a borrower; he apologized, blaming his “well- meaning effort” to write a book for a lay audience that was free of footnotes.
In The Little Book of Plagiarism, Richard Posner observes that plagiarism is not “especially heinous” but “embarrassingly second rate,” which partly explains why officially first- rate writers caught copying seem to regard plagiarism as a crime that other people commit. Posner, a federal appellate court judge, lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, and author of an impressive array of big books as well as little ones, offers an idiosyncratic primer on plagiarism and intellectual property, combining bytes of history, law, and cultural analysis in an essay of about 100 pages. The book’s conclusion seems rushed and perfunctory, but this is an otherwise enjoyable “Cook’s tour.”...