Failed Hit Job on Neil Gorsuch Resurfaces

One of the more desperate efforts made in defense of Claudine Gay as she was toppled from her position at Harvard for plagiarism was to dredge up a failed hit from 2017 on Neil Gorsuch. During the battle over Gorsuch’s confirmation, John Bresnahan and Burgess Everett of Politico wrote that Gorsuch “copied the structure and language used by several authors and failed to cite source material in his book and an academic article.” Ed Whelan responded at the time.

Both noted that there were academic experts, including the “outside supervisors for Gorsuch’s dissertation” and “the general editor for Gorsuch’s book publisher,” who saw no issue with Gorsuch’s writings under the standards for writings on legal philosophy. To my eye, Gorsuch should nonetheless have been more careful in his citations in the examples offered by Bresnahan and Everett. Yet, even they conceded that the handful of challenged passages were “a small fraction of published works by Gorsuch, which include hundreds of legal opinions, academic articles, news articles and his book.”

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Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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One of the more desperate efforts made in defense of Claudine Gay as she was toppled from her position at Harvard for plagiarism was to dredge up a failed hit from 2017 on Neil Gorsuch. During the battle over Gorsuch’s confirmation, John Bresnahan and Burgess Everett of Politico wrote that Gorsuch “copied the structure and language used by several authors and failed to cite source material in his book and an academic article.” Ed Whelan responded at the time.

Both noted that there were academic experts, including the “outside supervisors for Gorsuch’s dissertation” and “the general editor for Gorsuch’s book publisher,” who saw no issue with Gorsuch’s writings under the standards for writings on legal philosophy. To my eye, Gorsuch should nonetheless have been more careful in his citations in the examples offered by Bresnahan and Everett. Yet, even they conceded that the handful of challenged passages were “a small fraction of published works by Gorsuch, which include hundreds of legal opinions, academic articles, news articles and his book.”