So it turns out Neil Gorsuch, the "intellectual giant" who Republicans insist is an "outstanding legal scholar with sterling credentials" and who is "going to be on the Supreme Court because he's earned the right to be there," has some issues on the scholar front. To be specific, he's been liberal in "borrowing" other people's ideas and words for his own work.
Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch copied the structure and language used by several authors and failed to cite source material in his book and an academic article, according to documents provided to POLITICO.
The documents show that several passages from the tenth chapter of his 2006 book, "The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia," read nearly verbatim to a 1984 article in the Indiana Law Journal. In several other instances in that book and an academic article published in 2000, Gorsuch borrowed from the ideas, quotes and structures of scholarly and legal works without citing them. […]
"Each of the individual incidents constitutes a violation of academic ethics. I've never seen a college plagiarism code that this would not be in violation of," said Rebecca Moore Howard, a Syracuse University professor who has written extensively on the issue.
Elizabeth Berenguer, an associate professor of law at Campbell Law School, said that under legal or academic standards Gorsuch's similarities to the Indiana Law Journal would be investigated "as a potential violation of our plagiarism policy. It's similar enough to the original work."
Another professor, Duke's Keiran Healy tweets that "Gorsuch's citations-at-one-remove read like a thing people commonly do when they want to look more scholarly/rigorous than they really are."
But the White House offered their own "experts" to talk to Politico, who unsurprisingly "asserted that the criteria for citing work in dissertations on legal philosophy is different than for other types of academia or journalism: While Gorsuch may have borrowed language or facts from others without attribution, they said, he did not misappropriate ideas or arguments." Political scientist Dan Drezner scoffs at that notion: "Compared to the social sciences, legal scholarship footnotes EVERYTHING. Practically every sentence. It's a thing we joke about." It's a thing, he points out, that law professor Orin Kerr jokes about.
So, yeah, the "originalist" Gorsuch is actually pretty much just another right-wing hack whose thinking actually reflects a hodgepodge of ideas from other people and comments he's strung together. Not that that will bother Republicans at all. That's the whole appeal of Gorsuch to them. Josh Marshall nails it with this tweet: "Premise of Gorsuch nom was he would copy Scalia's writing, jurisprudence under his own signature. So not sure this is new development."