PDFs of Dershowitz, Peters and Twain

Download Dershowitz_Twain_Docs.pdf

Frank Menetrez in "Elena Kagan’s Harvard: Golden Age or Reign of Error?" states that Norman Finkelstein was right to accuse Alan Dershowitz of plagiarism from Joan Peters. One "smoking gun" is identical errors that Dershowitz makes. Menetrez states:

I looked at one of the passages identified by Finkelstein, a long quotation from Mark Twain, and found that Dershowitz’s version of the quotation and the version in the book Dershowitz was accused of plagiarizing [from Peters] contained 20 identical errors in a mere 21 lines of text. Some of the errors were large (such as the omission of 87 pages of text without an ellipsis) and some were small (such as altered or missing words or punctuation), but the cumulative weight of the evidence was overwhelming. There was no way Dershowitz could have independently generated exactly those 20 errors -- he must have copied them. It was an open-and-shut case.

Here are the relevant PDFs of Dershowitz, Peters and Twain's writings so people can indepently verify Menetrez's accusation.

1 response

I see here that we have a situation where one author (Peters) has quoted Twain, and another (Dershowitz) has quoted those same passages. Since Twain's work is now in the public domain, and no longer proprietary, and since the quotations were, I assume, properly cited, neither author committed plagiarism. The question is, did Dershowitz plagiarize Peters' rendition of Twain's remarks? I suspect that Dershowitz read Peters' book, made note of the useful material therein, and, rather than acquiring the original text, simply had a law student or clerk type into his word processor the passage from Peters' book. Any clerk or student in that position would naturally copy the text exactly, even if mistakes were contained therein. Obviously neither the typist nor Dershowitz realized that the text was incorrectly transcribed by Peters, and Dershowitz published the passage attributed to Twain, not Peters. This drives home the point that a competent copy editor would have caught these mistakes. Every publisher is responsible for tweaking every book to the point of excellence, and if the quote had been verified (as good copy editors do), and the manuscript proofread correctly, this controversial accusation would not have occurred. I did not read the complete decision handed down by Kagan, so I am only hypothesizing. I would hope that she would have reached the same conclusion and only admonish writers to finish their homework before publishing their work.

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