Court Nominee Accused of Plagiarism Won't Withdraw

Working with Specter on Capitol Hill, he helped draft complex bankruptcy and asbestos legislation, winning plaudits from a bipartisan group of senators when he left to return to teaching in 2007.

Erica Chabot, a spokeswoman for Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), the Judiciary Committee chairman, declined to comment on the nomination yesterday.

For his part, O'Neill pointed to good relations he had fostered with lawmakers during two years in the Senate. "I am a creature of the Senate," he said. "If you believe this was inadvertent, and it was fairly insignificant, is it something to kill somebody's career for?"

Two Senate staff members said questions about O'Neill's use of other published work had circulated for the past year or so. However, Specter and other top committee aides had been pushing the White House to nominate him, despite the allegations, they said.

O'Neill surrendered his tenure at George Mason after a university investigation concluded he had used material from another author, without attribution, in a law review piece published shortly before he achieved the coveted academic status, according to Daniel D. Polsby, dean of the law school. O'Neill remains at the school as an associate professor. The article at issue was later withdrawn from the Supreme Court Economic Review, an incident first reported by the Times.

Polsby said that the school took the allegations "very seriously," and that the case followed a routine policy on scientific misconduct that was in place at the time.

O'Neill's bid has not yet been scheduled for a hearing. The Judiciary Committee is awaiting his rating by the American Bar Association, which assesses the qualifications of judicial candidates.

Senate Democrats and Republicans have clashed for months over a handful of judicial nominees to appeals courts. It is unclear whether the plagiarism allegations will hurt O'Neill's bid on a crowded Senate agenda, with limited time remaining before the August recess, a congressional aide said.