ER - WHOSE WORD WAS 'MY WORD'? 9/7/2006

WHOSE WORD WAS 'MY WORD'?

Significant portions of a guest commentary submitted by Humboldt County District Attorney Paul Gallegos, and printed in the Saturday edition of the Times-Standard, appeared earlier in an academic paper written in 2000 about a World War II-era Western starring Henry Fonda.

Gallegos’ commentary appeared as a “My Word” guest column in the Times-Standard, under the title “Vigilantism a force of anarchy.” In it he argued that vigilantes put the rights of all people at risk by overriding the safeguards of due process — an argument legal scholar Robert Louis Felix made six years earlier in “The Ox-Bow Incident,” a paper written about a 1943 film by the same name.

“There’s certainly nothing earth-shattering about the thoughts,” said Felix, a professor emeritus of legal research at the University of South Carolina School of Law.

But it was not just the thoughts that Gallegos used. In at least 10 instances, complete sentences and parts of sentences from the 2000 paper — found on the Internet by using the Google search engine — appeared in Gallegos’ submission.

“There’s such a thing as fair use, which means that within certain limits work can be quoted for academic purposes. I’m saying quoted now, not lifted. I think clearly phrases are taken out of the article,” Felix said.

“If I knew that the article had been read and parts of it lifted without any intention to acknowledge or attribute it, I’d be offended.”

The movie, based on a 1940 novel by Walter van Tilburg Clark, tells the story of three innocent men who are lynched for a crime that didn’t occur.

“I couldn’t say if this is a crime or not, but in academic circles we call it plagiarism,” said Lee Bowker, Ph.D., emeritus dean of Humboldt State University’s College of Behavioral and Social Sciences.

Bowker had not seen the two articles and spoke only in general terms about a problem that is common on college campuses. “The taking of even a single line from another source without attribution is plagiarism. That’s the academic standard,” he said. “It’s an extremely serious offense. It’s so serious that presidents of universities have been fired for it. Faculty members have had their tenure revoked. A single instance proved against a faculty member can ruin that person’s career.”

“I would not accuse him of plagiarism,” Felix said, “but it’s difficult to imagine he wrote this particular (opinion) piece without some knowledge of the article.”

Reached by phone Wednesday afternoon, Gallegos initially said he was not specifically aware of the article Felix had written, but later said that he believed he had read it, adding that he had read a lot of articles about the “The Ox-Bow Incident.”

“It’s one of my favorite stories. ... As a prosecutor, I loved the story.”

When asked if he knew that swaths of his “My Word” commentary had previously appeared in Felix’s article, Gallegos responded, “No. I was not aware of that.”

“Obviously the question here is whether I intended to take direct quotes without attribution, and no, I didn’t intend that,” he said.

“Certainly when you’re getting ideas sometimes you write them back in a way that sounds very similar.”

But Gallegos maintained that he did not intend to represent Felix’s work as his own. “If I’ve done that, I certainly apologize to the professor.”

Felix said his paper had originally been presented at a 2000 meeting of the American Culture Association in New Orleans. A version of the article has been collected in “Screening Justice,” a book of essays about law and film.

Felix said he does not know who currently holds the copyright on the article.

by Heather Muller , 9/7/2006
Copyright (C) 2005, The Eureka Reporter. All rights reserved.

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