A Student Plagiarism Contract Case

Thanks to InsideHigherEd, I became aware of this recent case out of the First Circuit, Walker v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, No. 15-1154, and seeing as it involved JOLT, the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology that I was an executive editor of when I was in law school there, I couldn’t resist digging into the case. 

And I’m glad I did, because it’s a really interesting case about the lingering effect of honor code violations and the wording of school academic policies. 

The plaintiff graduated from Harvard Law School in 2009. During her time at Harvard, she was a member of JOLT. In that capacity, she drafted a student note. However, when she sent the note to senior editors at JOLT, they became concerned about plagiarism issues and referred the note to the HLS Administrative Board. The Board concluded that the plaintiff’s note contained plagiarism that violated the school’s Handbook of Academic Policies and a notation was placed on her transcript. The plaintiff still graduated from HLS but had a “lucrative” offer of employment withdrawn after the notation was placed on her transcript. So the plaintiff sued to have the notation on her transcript removed. HLS won summary judgment at the district court level and this appeal followed. 

The court affirmed the judgment of the district court. The parties agreed that the Student Handbook constituted a contract between the plaintiff and HLS. (The court noted that this was not actually obvious under Massachusetts law but that it would treat the handbook as a contract because the parties did not dispute it.) Therefore, the court focused its review on whether the plaintiff’s behavior violated the stated plagiarism policy in a way that the plaintiff should have reasonably expected.

The Handbook stated: “All work submitted by a student for any academic or non-academic exercise is expected to be the student’s own work.” The plaintiff’s main argument was that the student note she sent to the JOLT editors was just a draft that she planned to edit in the future, and the Handbook policy should be read as only applying to completed work that was not expected to undergo further editing. The court disagreed, however. The wording of the Handbook was extremely broad, referring to “all work.” A student in the plaintiff’s position should reasonably have expected that any student note submitted to the editors, whether a draft or in final form, would be held to the standards of the policy. Nothing about “all work” would make a student think that drafts were omitted from the definition, according to the court.