Eye-opening item by Joseph Bottum in the current issue of The Weekly Standard about how Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree “inadvertently,” “under pressure of a deadline,” copied out of one book on Brown v. Board of Education into his own book on Brown. Except it’s really much worse than that: Ogletree wasn’t even really writing the book he authored–he was having his assistants write it, or, rather, he was having them copy and then paraphrase the work of other authors. As Bottum notes: “Despite his very limited scholarly credentials, Charles Ogletree was granted tenure at Harvard Law School in 1993 as an expert in race relations during the peak of the agitation—sit-ins, marches, accusations of racism—to diversify the school’s faculty. Rumors swirled about the writing, editing, and placement of his tenure-winning essay in the Harvard Law Review, but, by any measure, Ogletree was hired precisely because race cases like Brown v. Board of Education were his specialty. He is not supposed to need other sources. He’s a Harvard law professor; other sources are supposed to need him.”