Harvard grad sues to revoke plagiarism finding

A 2009 Harvard Law School graduate has sued her alma mater and two former classmates, claiming that their false accusations of plagiarism cost her a promising legal career.

Megon Walker has struggled to find legal employment since graduating because her academic record includes a reprimand for plagiarizing a law review article draft, the suit alleges.

Walker filed suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts on May 4, naming as defendants the president and fellows of Harvard College; law school dean of students Ellen Cosgrove; and professor and college administrative board chairman Lloyd Weinreb. Also named are two former student editors-in-chief of the law school's Journal of Law and Technology, Bradley Hamburger and Lindsay Kitzinger.

"By the false allegation of plagiarism resulting in unfair branding of plaintiff as a cheat and as academically dishonest, defendants have destroyed everything plaintiff has worked so hard to achieve and what she deserves, and the plaintiff is left daily with that shame, no job, alone with only the knowledge that unless she has relief from the court, she will never obtain what she has worked so hard to achieve and what she deserves," the complaint reads.

Harvard spokeswoman Sarah Marston declined to comment on the suit, and Kitzinger did not respond to requests for comment. Hamburger declined to comment when reached on May 11.

Walker enrolled at Harvard Law School in 2006 after completing a bachelors of science degree in biotechnology from the Rochester Institute of Technology at age 19. She followed up with a doctorate in bioinformatics from Boston University in 2007. Walker aspired to work in patent and technology law, said her attorney, John Markham II.

Walker volunteered to write an article in December 2008 about the high-profile Bilski patent case, according to the complaint. However, in the week before the submission deadline in February 2009, Walker's laptop was hit with a virus and she lost her most recent work on the draft, the complaint said. Harvard's computer help staff were unable to retrieve portions of the work, including many of her citations, it says.

The suit claims that Walker informed the editors about her computer problem and asked for an extension, but that Hamburger and Kitzinger required her to submit what she had on the understanding that she would have additional time to complete the draft.

However, in mid-March, Hamburger and Kitzinger called Walker into a meeting to inform her that they were pulling her article and reporting her to the law school's student disciplinary committee for plagiarism.

Following a hearing before the administrative board, Walker was found guilty of plagiarism and a letter of reprimand was placed in her law school permanent record and noted on her transcript.

As result, Walker hasn't been able to land a legal job, Markham said.

"Exasperation is the reason she's doing this now," Markham said. "She has tried to put this behind her, but she has come to realize that as long as this is on her record, she will never have the legal career she believed she would."

Walker had an associate job lined up at Goodwin Procter, where she had been a summer clerk, that came with a $160,000 starting salary, he said. But the firm revoked the offer when it learned of the reprimand. Similarly, she landed an associate job at a "national firm" where she worked for three months, Markham said, but she was fired when a partner learned of the reprimand, even though it had been noted when she was hired.

Those rescinded offers have cost Walker upwards of $500,000 in salary, the complaint says. Subsequent attempts to land a job have never progressed beyond Walker disclosing the reprimand, Markham said, and she has moved back in with her parents while she looks for work.

The complaint alleges that Harvard didn't follow its own student disciplinary procedures, as laid out in the student handbook, because submitting a partially completed and fragmented draft doesn't constitute plagiarism. The complaint also claims that the school violated its own rules by conducting its review in an adversarial manner and not allowing a full cross-examination of witnesses.

It claims that Hamburger and Kitzinger brought the plagiarism charges against Walker because they didn't want to assume the added work of editing the article and facing the delays its publication would cause.

Walker claims breach of conflict, interference with contract and business advantage, libel, negligent infliction of emotional distress and irreparable injury. She seeks upwards of $75,000 in damages and a court order that Harvard remove the reprimand from her record.

(Published by Law.com - May 11, 2012)