Supreme Plagiarism

As I've said I often think plagiarism "scandals" are overblown. Citation standards vary with context and type of publication. Not every publication has footnotes. Sometimes what should be well-known quotes are put in as callbacks and poetic references. Not every Bible quote needs to be prefaced with, "as it was written in the Bible," for example. Sometimes mere sloppiness is just that and is a forgivable offense.

But this is actually plagiarism. The key is that he cited the original sources while ripping off the secondary ones.

In the most striking example, Gorsuch, in his book, appears to duplicate sentences from an Indiana Law Journal article written by Abigail Lawlis Kuzma without attributing her. Instead, he uses the same sources that Kuzma used: A 1982 Indiana court ruling that was later sealed, a well-known pediatrics textbook, “Rudolph’s Pediatrics,” and a 1983 article in the Bloomington Sunday Herald.