Judicial Nominee Could Face Trouble Over Copying Issue

The former chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee could be in for a tough judicial nomination fight over questions surrounding passages in at least five articles he wrote that tracked the work of other authors, the New York Times reports.

Michael O’Neill, now an associate law professor at George Mason School of Law, has been nominated for a seat on the Washington, D.C., federal district court. He told the Times the duplications were because of “a poor work method” in which he combined research materials and his own work in a single computer file.

One publication, the Supreme Court Economic Review, retracted an article by O’Neill four years ago after finding that “substantial portions” were taken from a book review by University of Connecticut law professor Anne Dailey, the story says.

Another law professor, Neal Katyal of Georgetown law school, told the Times he doesn’t believe O’Neill intentionally copied parts of a 1997 article Katyal wrote for the Michigan Law Review. “Mike is an innovative thinker and has always had integrity in my many dealings with him,” Katyal said. “I can’t imagine that he would intentionally copy this banal point from my article.”