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Nice Work If You Can Get It

$350 an hour for copying a clutch of Wikipedia pages: While his students go into debt and fail to get jobs, a Georgetown law professor shows everyone exactly how postmodern simulacral culture works. He gets an expert witness for the prosecution gig and lifts much of his expert report from the web. Look Ma – No hands! And I’m getting $350 an hour at the same time! Are you proud of me?

But now he’s gone and fucked up the case.

“[James] Feinerman’s pervasive plagiarism from this unreliable and error-prone source, which has been rejected by federal courts all over the country, casts serious doubt on the reliability of his entire testimony,” … said [a defense lawyer] in a court filing.

Now you know what Feinerman’s gonna say when he’s finally forced to say something. You know because for years you’ve been reading this blog on the subject of the atelier crowd, right? Feinerman’s gonna blame it on the people he hired to write his expert report for him.

Really, really look Ma no hands.

Margaret Soltan, December 2, 2013 9:59AM
Posted in: plagiarism, where the simulacrum ends

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3 Responses to “Nice Work If You Can Get It”

  1. MattF Says:

    Our guys are OK at it, but we’ve fallen behind the Chinese:

    http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6162/1035.full

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    MattF: As usual, they’ve beaten us at our own game. But with people like Feinerman on the case, I know we can catch up.

  3. University Diaries »  Cynical ambition. Laziness. Incapacity. Says:

    […] She forgot an obvious one: money. Expert witnesses often get paid TONS (I’m looking at you, Feinerman), and professional expert witness Fancy Harvard MD has been in the trade for awhile. As with the […]

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