Appeals Court Upholds Law School Plagiarism Decision

A federal appeals court upheld last week Harvard Law School’s decision to reprimand a student for plagiarism, affirming a lower court ruling against the plaintiff, Megon J. Walker, who sued Harvard in 2012.

Walker, a 2009 Law School graduate, sued the University in 2012, arguing that the Law School had committed defamation and a breach of contract when it left a permanent mark of plagiarism on her transcript. Specifically, her suit charged that she did not plagiarize a submission to the Law School’s student-run “Journal of Law and Technology” because her work was a draft and not intended as a final submission. The Law School Administrative Board’s decision to leave a disciplinary mark on her transcript, she argued in the suit, stymied her career and job prospects.

When Massachusetts district court judge Rya W. Zobel ’53 ruled against Walker in 2015, Walker appealed the decision. Her appeal focused her claims, again contending that the Law School’s disciplinary action breached the terms of the student handbook and defamed her.

In its decision last Monday, the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the previous ruling, refuting Walker’s argument that the draft was exempt from the Law School’s plagiarism policy. The court ruled that the draft did constitute a submission under the Law School’s policy.

“Walker has not presented facts a student could have relied upon to form a reasonable expectation that the plagiarism policy had the meaning she is asserting,” the circuit court wrote in its opinion.

John J.E. Markham II, Walker’s attorney, said that while his client was disappointed by the outcome, she was pleased that the circuit court had accepted some of her claims.

“She notes with some satisfaction that the First Circuit court acknowledged that she believed that she could change the draft that she had handled over to the editorial board and that she was not trying to pass off her draft as final,” Markham said. “Unfortunately, Harvard employed a very technical definition of plagiarism, which the court found to be any delivery of a piece of work, regardless of any intent to clean it up later.”

Markham added that he and Walker would be reviewing further available legal options.

In her lawsuit, Walker named the Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, the former Law School Dean of Students Ellen Cosgrove, and Lloyd Weinreb, who was then the chair of the Law School’s Administrative Board. She initially included Bradley Hamburger and Lindsay Kitzinger, the editors-in-chief of the Journal of Law and Technology to which the work was originally submitted. Walker later dismissed her complaint against the two students before the district court ruling.

Daryl J. Lapp, who represented the University in the lawsuit, Cosgrove, Weinreb, and Kitzinger did not respond to requests for comment. Hamburger declined to comment for the story.