Professor Tribe vs. Sheriff Clarke: Who’s the more careful scholar?

(5/25, 4:30 p.m. update: Thanks to law professor Glenn Reynolds for promoting this post yesterday with a tweet and, this morning, with a link, bringing thousands of additional readers to this blog just in the last 24 hours. Thanks also for the mention on LewRockwell.com, with this clever summary of the Professor Tribe’s student ghostwriting operation: “It Takes a Tribe.” (end update)

If you pay attention only to liberal-slanted mass media outlets, you’d assume the answer is easy.

Surely Professor Laurence H. Tribe of the prestigious Harvard Law School must be a much more careful scholar than Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke, who has recently been branded, in what we view as a political hit job, as a “plagiarist” — not just by CNN (which made the initial charge), but also by the Washington Post, USA Today, NY Daily News, ABC, and Slate, among other mass-media outlets.

But he’s not. Sheriff Clarke, a part-time scholar, is vastly more careful (not to mention honest) than Professor Tribe.

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Timeline of scholarly misconduct by Laurence Tribe

(5/24, 2 p.m. update: Thanks to law professor Glenn Reynolds for yet another “Insta-launch,” and particularly for this memorable line: “Who does Clarke think he is, Larry Tribe?” It inspired us to write another post, which will be up soon. (end update)

At the bottom of our post yesterday we linked to posts on two old blogs written by Harvard Law students, summarizing evidence of scholarly misconduct by one of Harvard’s superstar law professors, Laurence H. Tribe (previously praised on this blog, but now added to our enemies list).

To aid our readers in assessing whether we are being fairly critical not just of CNN, but of all mass-media outlets (e.g., WaPo, USA Today, NY Daily News, ABC, Slate), for failing to cover liberal Tribe’s plagiarism/ghostwriting scandals when he was appointed to high office in 2010, while being eager to cover much less serious issues involving the scholarly work of conservative Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr., below is a brief chronology of some of the main evidence concerning the allegations against Professor Tribe.

Why didn’t CNN cover plagiarism by Obama’s mentors, Ogletree and Tribe?

(5/23, 10:30 a.m. update) Thanks to Harvard attorney John Hinderaker for his blog post summarizing and commenting on this post: “CNN’s Political Hit Job on Sheriff Clarke.”

[end of update]

Sheriff David A. Clark Jr. enjoys well-deserved national fame for his championing of conservative causes, and particularly for his pushback against liberal “solutions” to the problems of violent crime and urban disfunction that liberals have created through the last half century of misguided social policy.

Indeed, Sheriff Clark has admirers even in at the most far-left institutions — even at Harvard Law School.

Which is why some of the more conservative students at Harvard Law School, including those of us who launched this blog, only one of whom will be graduating soon (more fun next year, tied to the 200th anniversary; stay tuned!), were so pleased to hear last week that Sheriff Clarke will soon be filling an important post in the Department of Homeland Security, in charge of relations with state and local law enforcement.

We were not so pleased to read this hit piece, published by CNN on May 20, attempting to brand Sheriff Clarke as a “plagiarist” because, in writing a master’s thesis which drew on dozens of primary sources, in citing a few of the sources, in various passages of his very lengthy paper, he accurately cited the pages of the sources on which he relied, thus giving full credit to each author, but did not put quotation marks around various passages that Sheriff Clarke had not completely reworded, so that some of the wording was the same.