AS RANDY BARNETT SAYS, you know what Republicans didn’t do to Merrick Garland? This: “Surprise, surprise. Another desperate 11th-hour smear, something that appears to have become a rite of passage for Republican Supreme Court nominees. Someone (David Brock, call your office?) is shopping around to news outlets baseless claims that Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch committed acts of plagiarism in four passages in his 2006 book The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. Multiple academics who have reviewed the charges—including one of Gorsuch’s imagined victims—have rejected those claims, which, they explain, rest on a misunderstanding of academic citation standards and don’t involve misappropriation of anyone’s ideas, theories, or creative expressions.”

Well, I didn’t write the book on plagiarism, but I did (with bigshot DC lawyer Peter Morgan) write a chapter on it, and specifically on how bogus charges of plagiarism are abused to create a false ethical cloud. You can read it here.