Did Gorsuch Plagiarize?

White House Denies

Judge Neil Gorsuch appears to have copied portions of another author’s work in several paragraphs of his 2006 book opposing assisted suicide. 

Buzzfeed’s Chris Geidner was the first to report that 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.”

Politico’s John Bresnahan and Burgess Everett offer a stronger critique:

Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch copied the structure and language used by several authors and failed to cite source material in his book and an academic article, according to documents provided to POLITICO.

The documents show that several passages from the tenth chapter of his 2006 book, “The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia,” read nearly verbatim to a 1984 article in the Indiana Law Journal. In several other instances in that book and an academic article published in 2000, Gorsuch borrowed from the ideas, quotes and structures of scholarly and legal works without citing them.

The White House is denying this is plagiarism.

“This false attack has been strongly refuted by highly-regarded academic experts, including those who reviewed, professionally examined, and edited Judge Gorsuch’s scholarly writings, and even the author of the main piece cited in the false attack,” White House spokesman Steven Cheung told Politico. “There is only one explanation for this baseless, last-second smear of Judge Gorsuch: those desperate to justify the unprecedented filibuster of a well-qualified and mainstream nominee to the Supreme Court.”

Is it plagiarism?

A few responses via Twitter:

Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Senior Fellow in foreign policy at Brookings Institution:

University of Tennessee Associate Professor of Law and Director of Legal Writing:

Harvard Law School lecturer:

Former Attorney General Eric Holder’s former spokesman:

Associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University:

A contributing editor to Politico Magazine:

Talking Points Memo Editor and Publisher offers a humorous response:

Philosophy graduate student at CUNY:

Director of the UNiversity of Florida Center for Latin American Studies: