Tribe's Fantasy Life

Ramesh Ponnuru's article on Laurence Tribe is worth reading.

But if Tribe's defense of Goodwin makes sense, then perhaps it could applied to this lapse too: At least Tribe didn't present "fantasy" as "fact." Tribe's colleague Alan Dershowitz came to his defense, just as Tribe himself had defended Goodwin and another colleague charged with plagiarism, law professor Charles Ogletree. (They're quite a band of brothers there in Cambridge.) "If the Standard were to do the same minuscule analysis of every word in the books written by the paragons of the right, they would find much the same thing," said Dershowitz.

But in another recent incident, Tribe appears to have committed precisely the offense that he identified as "the cardinal sin for any scholar" — and it's an incident too weird for anyone to maintain with any plausibility that every scholar does the same.