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: Lawbeat

Sympathetic portrait of an accused plagiarist

By Mark Obbie

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Attention, flacks -- er, PR professionals. Any time a client under fire for ethics violations wonders whether to cooperate with a reporter who's digging into the facts and profiling your client, show him this piece today by Adam Liptak. It should help both of you resist the urge to hunker down. That's because the subject, George Mason University law professor Michael O'Neill, comes off looking as good as he might hope under difficult and delicate circumstances. O'Neill, a former Senate Judiciary Committee chief counsel who played a key role in past Supreme Court confirmations, is himself now a nominee to the federal district bench. As Liptak explains, O'Neill also has been under fire for some time for copying other scholars' words and using them as his own in legal papers. Many friends and skeptics have their say in the story. Most importantly, so does O'Neill, who early in the article portrays the copying as the result of a “a poor work method.” He does his explaining from his dining room table at home, rather than from a lawyer's sterile conference room, where he impresses Liptak as "a boyish 46-year-old who wore jeans and a wrinkled blue button-down shirt." The friends' descriptions seem to carry the most punch in the story. Their verdict on O'Neill, as summarized by Liptak: "a creative, fair and exceptionally able lawyer." Liptak ends on this sympathetic note:

Asked how he would have viewed a judicial nominee like himself in his old job on the Judiciary Committee, Mr. O’Neill answered elliptically. “I’ve tried to have a decent reputation with people,” he said. “It’s certainly my fault. You’d like to be not just defined by the mistakes that you make in life.”

I'm not suggesting that Liptak did a puff piece. I find it well-reported and well-rounded, even though I would have liked to know more about the status of O'Neill's nomination; the politics of it (his own ideological pedigree, and how he might fare with Judiciary Committee and Senate Democrats); O'Neill's legal expertise (what topics his scholarship focused on); and a little more wrestling with the word that goes unsaid in the article -- plagiarism -- and what would constitute it under these circumstances. As is, though, the article should satisfy O'Neill and his handlers that it was a wise move to speak to a reporter -- or at least to speak to a reporter as humane as Liptak.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on July 04, 2008 (boomark / email).