Law School Plagiarism And Bar Admission

The Georgia Supreme Court denied bar  certification to an applicant who “had submitted a paper at the end of his second year of law school that was a virtually verbatim reproduction of sections of five previously published sources, none of which was cited in the paper.” The Board to Determine Fitness of Bar Applicants “by clear implication did not believe his account” of the circumstances of the plagiarism. The applicant “has never accepted full responsibility for what he did, and he has not yet been rehabilitated.”

Lesson? If there is something like this in an applicants past, bar admission will be denied absent an acknowledgment of the misconduct and evidence that he or she has undergone a sufficient moral rehabilitation such that the admitting court will have a reasonable degree of confidence that such behavior will not recur. (Mike Frisch)