Daily Archives: July 4, 2008

Presidential Pick Plagiarised?

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Our professor and ethics expert Deborah Rhode is quoted in Adam Liptak’s front-page story in today’s New York Times, “Copying Issue Raises Hurdle For Bush Pick.”  The story includes a graphic where you can compare for yourself.

Several articles by Michael E. O’Neill, nominated by President Bush to be a judge on the Federal District Court in Washington last month, contain passages that appear to have been lifted from other scholars’ works without quotation marks or attributions.

According to the story,

Last year, a peer-reviewed legal journal, the Supreme Court Economic Review, issued a retraction of an article by Mr. O’Neill in 2004.  “Substantial portions” of the article, the editors wrote, were “appropriated without attribution” from a book review by another law professor.

Our professor is noted and quoted thusly:

Deborah L. Rhode, an authority on legal ethics at Stanford, said the retraction by the Supreme Court Economic Review was “extremely unusual” and amounted to “a textbook case of conduct that casts doubt on someone’s fitness for judicial office.”

“That’s a serious form of misconduct in an academic career,” Ms. Rhode said. “I would think it would be viewed equally seriously in a judicial career. In my judgment, that would be disqualifying.”

Internet Independence

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Today’s San Jose Mercury News has a ”Silicon Valley Dispatch” about our professor Larry Lessig’s month in Madagascar when he was completely off-line to “assert his independence from the digital grid — no blogging, limited e-mail, few phone calls — for a month.”  The story, “Let’s take a holiday from Net – Stanford Prof Services as Example,” by Mike Cassidy, suggests that we should all pull the plug on occasion:

A month might be a stretch for most of us.  But how about a week or two?  And what better time than Independence Day to consider pulling the plug on the digital world?

 

And Larry Lessig on the Declaration of Independence is noted here.

Lexis v. Westlaw for research — better, different, or same and the qwerty effect?

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Today I received SmartCILP June 27, 2008, which included notice of this article:

Cavicchi, Jon R., “Lexis v. Westlaw for research–better, different, or same and the qwerty effect?,” 47 IDEA 363-406 (2007).

The author presents his own poll of LexisNexis versus Westlaw preferences.  The author sent email to the IPPROFS listerv, third year law students at Pierce Law Center, and graduate students in his school’s Master of Intellectual Property, Commerce and Technology (M.I.P.) and Master of Laws in Intellectual Property, Commerce and Technology (LL.M.) programs asking which service they prefer and why. He received comments from nineteen IP law professors and ten students.

The article concludes:

This article could easily be double in size to cover all the bases. As I was concluding this article, an IDEA editor came to my office to check some footnotes. I told her that this article was coming to a close, and she immediately said, “So, what’s your conclusion; which is better for IP research?” Alas, we end where we start. There is no one answer. Only you can define which service best meets your information needs. I hope this article has informed you on some content and features to consider in helping you define your needs. I use Lexis and Westlaw liberally, which gives me the advantage to compare and contrast on an ongoing basis. We also return to the ongoing themes of this series. Lexis and Westlaw are doing battle with a host of no cost and low cost information providers. The smart IP researcher faced with having to pay for Wexis access will craft a package that includes those features and databases that may be beyond cost effective alternatives.