Plagiarism Isn't Theft

So says public intellectual Judge Richard Posner, in an essay linked to by Arts and Letters Daily. His money paragraph:

Journalists (like politicians) have a bad reputationfor truthfulness, and historians, in this "postmodernist" era, are suspected of having embraced an extreme form of relativism and of having lost their regard for facts. Both groups hope by taking a very hard line against plagiarism and fabrication to reassure the public that they are serious diggers after truth whose efforts, a form of "sweat equity," deserve protection against copycats.

Hmmm. My first reaction is that none of my students better read this. My second is that I think he's right about the reason historians have lately begun to take plagiarism seriously. And my third reaction is that Posner is beginning to jar a bit with all his arch and superior essays in which he, the libertarian bien-pensant sees through the dark and shrouding woods more clearly than the rest of us benighted sheep.

I wonder...he does write a lot of stuff. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, "Sir, if he believes this, why then, let us check his references after he has published."