When Harvard stars Lauarence Tribe and Charles Ogletree had plagiarism problems, Elena Kagan rode to the rescue

When Barack Obama’s two faculty mentors at Harvard Law got in trouble for plagiarism, they were rescued by Dean Elena Kagan.

In 1989, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe hired first-year Harvard law student Barack Obama as his research assistant. After Obama was elected president, Tribe would gush, "His stunning combination of analytical brilliance and personal charisma, openness and maturity, vision and pragmatism, was unmistakable from my very first encounter."

Obama had one other prominent mentor among the Harvard faculty, Professor Charles Ogletree, an African American. In the run-up to the election, Ogletree would enthuse, "I'm so excited about this candidacy that I just can't tell you. I'm just overfull with joy."

In 2004, Tribe and Ogletree both made the news in ways they might wish they had not. And now in 2010, that news has come back to haunt their Law School dean at that time, Elana Kagan, and, if there is any justice in the world, it should eventually suck in Obama himself.

In September 2004, as Obama was cruising to victory in his U.S. Senate race, Tribe was publicly apologizing for plagiarizing -- though, of course, he would not use that term -- Henry J. Abraham's 1974 book, Justices and Presidents, to write his own 1985 book, God Save This Honorable Court.

Tribe's transgression had come to light only after he had publicly defended his colleague Ogletree, who just three weeks earlier had publicly apologized for the unauthorized heist of verbiage from Yale scholar Jack Balkin's book, What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said, and the stashing of it, nearly word-for-word, in his own book, All Deliberate Speed.

Appalled by Tribe's hypocrisy, an anonymous tipster alerted conservative scholar Joseph Bottum, who penned a damning 5,000 word article for The Weekly Standard, which revealed the extent of Tribe's theft and resulted in Tribe's half-hearted mea culpa.