Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Moresuch on Gorsuch

Read Mashey. Definitely plagiarism, and Gorsuch didn't read "his" primary sources (e.g. a court case that was sealed years prior to Gorsuch, after the author who Gorsuch copied had read the filings). The claims by his academic defenders, who should've been supervising him better, that you're supposed to cite primary sources and not secondary ones are laughable in these circumstances. Like Wegman, I'm not sure how they're supposed to supervise students given what they say is acceptable.

Academia does give you the ability to cite primary sources you haven't read, btw:  you cite the secondary source you have read as then citing the primary source that you wish you had read. This way you get to make your point while acknowledging that your support for it is flimsy - an honest way to go about the work.

If more of this stuff turns up in Gorsuch's background then he'll be a crippled member of the Supreme Court.

4 comments:

  1. No, he will be just one more with a dubious past.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Although Gorsuch's text section was mostly copied, the edits are actually more significant.

    1) Some were the usual wordsmithing or trivial edits (yellow).

    2) But the pink words in Kuzma were deleted or changed in a particular way.
    These cases are really tough calls involving uncertainty and ethics, stressful tradeoffs between (a) infant and (b) parent(s).
    Kuzma's text was pretty balanced between (a) and (b).
    Gorsuch was arguing strongly for "inviolability of human life", i.e., favoring (a) generally.
    The elements of Kuzma's text that would lend some sympathy to (b) ... mostly got edited out.

    For example, Kuzma wrote "an unpredictable degree of mental retardation", and (from reading more about this), the unpredictability is often a cause of great stress for the parents.

    Gorsuch changed that to "some degree of mental retardation".

    "some" is not normally a synonym for "unpredictable", i.e., this is not "Rogeting".

    ReplyDelete
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