District Court Nominee Copied Other Scholars' Work

In case you missed it last Friday, The New York Times had this story on Michael O’Neill, President Bush’s nominee to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Last year, a peer-reviewed journal, Supreme Court Economic Review, issued a retraction of an article O’Neill wrote in 2004. Editors found that “substantial portions” of the article were nabbed, without attribution, from a book review by another law professor. And, according to the Times, at least four articles by O’Neill in other publications contain cribbed passages.

There’s some neat symmetry here: As chief counsel and staff director of the Senate Judiciary Committee under Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa, from 2005 to 2007, O’Neill was the resident expert on judicial nominations. As such, he helped shepherd Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel Alito Jr. through the confirmation process.

O'Neill was nominated late last month. Before his time on the Judiciary Committee, he was a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission for six years. He has taught at George Mason University School of Law in between his government gigs.

In an interview with the Times last week, O’Neill imputed the copying to “a poor work method.” He said he often combined his research materials and his own work in a single computer file. “I didn’t keep appropriate track of things,” he said. “I frankly did a poor and negligent job.”

When asked how this behavior in another judicial nominee would have struck him when he was on the committee, O'Neill took a pass. “I’ve tried to have a decent reputation with people,” he told the Times. “It’s certainly my fault. You’d like to be not just defined by the mistakes that you make in life.”

O’Neill, a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and Chief Judge David Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, is vying for a vacancy created in January 2007, when Judge Gladys Kessler assumed senior status.

A confirmation hearing has not been scheduled. A spokeswoman for Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Judiciary Committee, says the committee is waiting for O'Neill's questionnaire and his American Bar Association rating.

Comments

[Glenn Sugameli]

According to several reports, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), as part of the deal to fend off right-wing opposition to his Judiciary chairmanship, was forced to hire Michael O'Neill as Senate Judiciary Committee chief counsel.

Sen. Specter later stated that O'Neill, as his chief counsel, knew about the insertion of language in the Patriot Act extension that allowed President Bush to replace U.S. attorneys without Senate approval, and that O'Neill did not notify Specter, who opposed the language when he learned about it.
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[I have headed Earthjustice's judicial nominations project since 2001.]

-Glenn Sugameli
Senior Legislative Counsel
Earthjustice
Washington, D.C.