Harvard Law Professor Caught Plagiarizing from Fellow Professor

-- Library Journal, 9/13/2004 2:00:00 AM

Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree is taking responsibility for lifting almost verbatim six paragraphs from the work of another author, which he used in his recent volume All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education (Norton). The Boston Globe reported that Ogletree is facing unspecified disciplinary charges from the university for including uncredited material from Yale Law School Professor Jack M. Balkin’s 2001 volume What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said (NYU Press). Ogletree asserts that the plagiarism was accidental, claiming he “made a serious mistake during the editorial process of completing this book, and delegated too much responsibility to others during the final editing process.” Balkin and Harvard Dean Elena Kagan reportedly received anonymous letters alerting them to the plagiarism. Balkin confronted Ogletree, who investigated the matter, while Kagan initiated a separate inquiry. Kagan couched the plagiarism as a “serious scholarly transgression” and determined that Ogletree did not intentionally use the passage without crediting Balkin. Harvard’s investigation asserted that the errors in fact were made by two separate research assistants, one of whom inserted the material without a closing quotation mark, and another who inadvertently dropped Balkin’s attribution; Ogletree, however, failed to recognize that he did not write the material, and therefore is held responsible. “There is no one to blame but me,” Ogletree told the publication.