McKenna: The Washington Supreme Court plagiarized its charter school decision

To allege someone ripped off your crossword puzzles is one thing. To allege a court has plagiarized is something completely different.

But that’s exactly what former Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna did on Seattle’s Morning News.

McKenna told KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross that the Washington Supreme Court’s majority opinion striking down the state’s charter school law contained 25-30 percent of the content printed in the plaintiff’s brief.

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Is it plagiarism? Technically it is. Is it illegal? No, because it doesn’t have a copyright.

“Is it ethical? I think that’s questionable,” McKenna said.

The court “lifted” up to 30 percent of its opinion from the brief, without even citing it, he explained. Most people didn’t notice because the brief was filed about 18 months before the opinion came out, McKenna said. But when McKenna went back and did a word comparison, sure enough, he found there were chunks of copy that were very close or exactly the same.

“I was astonished…” he said.

It isn’t unusual for a court to quote a brief, however, there was no such attribution.

“We would fall over in a faint if we found sentences, paragraphs, even pages copied and pasted,” McKenna said of the U.S. Supreme Court. “And, of course, that never happens.

“Frankly, it doesn’t look good for the state supreme court,” he said. “It makes them look lazy and somewhat captive of one side or the other.”

The real question Dave wanted to know is: should we tell anyone?

“Don’t tell anyone, Dave, it might be embarrassing,” McKenna warned.