How Kagan handled plagiarism cases while she was Dean

This might be of interest.

As Dean of Harvard Law School in 2004 and 2005 she treated two liberal law professors with kid gloves when they were busted for plagiarism. Her chicanery was so blatant that even a leftist academic said she should be fired for her "whitewash."
Kagan's essential absolution of both professors has been virtually unnoticed in the flood of stories about her possible Supreme Court nomination this year and in 2009 when she was considered a top candidate to replace liberal Justice David Souter.
But the way she handled professors Larry Tribe and Charles Ogletree, when they both were caught swiping the words of others, seems to violate basic principles of fairness.
She let the professors off easy for the kind of offense that for which any Harvard undergraduate or law school would have been suspended if not expelled.
As the Harvard Crimson wrote after Kagan and Harvard president Larry Summers declined to punish Tribe, "the glaring double standard set by Harvard stands as an inadequate precedent for future disappointments." . . .
The copycat cases came to light in the Fall of 2004. Ogletree was busted first for his book, part history part personal memoir, All Deliberate Speed.
Following a Harvard investigation ordered by Kagan when she received an unsigned letter claiming that Ogletree's book had ripped off a collection of essays about Brown Ogletree issued a September 3 statement on the school website.
The professor, who taught both Michelle Obama and Barack Obama at Harvard Law School, said that his book contained six paragraphs, almost word for word, from the essay collection, What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said. The 2001 book was edited by Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin.
Ogletree, who gained prominence when he served as Anita Hill's lawyer during the Clarence Thomas confirmation battle, said he took "complete responsibility" for the errors. Then he blamed it on his research assistants. . . .
A law professor who read about Tribe's defense tipped off The Weekly Standard that Tribe's 1985 book, G0d Save This Honourable Court, had purloined quite a bit from University of Virgina emeritus professor Henry Abraham's acclaimed 1974 book, Justice and Presidents.
In a humongous article posted on the magazine's website September 24 Joseph Bottum documented multiple passages from Tribe's book, the bible for liberals who Borked Robert Bork in 1987 when he was nominated for the Supreme Court in 1987, that were clearly lifted from Abraham's.
One phrase was taken verbatim. "Taft publicly pronounced Pitney to be a weak member' of the court."
Many others were virtually identical. Consider Bottum's many examples. Abraham: "Caleb Cushing was unquestionably highly qualified and possessed of a superb mind."' Tribe: "Cushing was possessed of a fine mind and undoubtedly highly qualified."
And that was the least of it, Bottum, now editor of First Things, noted that "The historical sections of the book typically consist of a long passage from Abraham crunched down by rephrasing and the elimination of detail -- as one might expect when Abraham's 298 pages of material are made to provide the facts around which Tribe builds his own thesis in [only] 143 pages of text."
Tribe quickly issued a non-apology apology. Just like Ogletree he accepted full responsibility for the plagiarism--and then proceeded to say it was all a harmless error. . . .