This dissertation violates the most basic rules of academic conduct in the field of legal studies or any other academic field for that matter. It contains full paragraphs copied from other authors. Any one sentence would be sufficient to constitute plagiarism, and there are hundreds of such sentences. This case is a textbook example of rather shameless plagiarism. Regarding the substance, it is difficult to comment given the extent of academic dishonesty. I would only say that, taken as a whole and quite apart from the extensive plagiarism, the final product strikes me as mediocre, very poor academic work. The thesis does not add anything to the topic it studies. It is overly descriptive and it fails to mention, much less engage meaningfully with scholarship in the field of international criminal law that had been published before the signing of the Rome Statute and before the defense of this dissertation.

Q2. The grey zone. Does the material include writing techniques that are controversial in your field but cannot be qualified fully and clearly as academic misconduct?

There is no grey zone here. This is a case of clear plagiarism. I should perhaps add that it is sometimes said, in the context of the Romanian debates, that doctorates in law are by necessity descriptive and cannot be original because that would mean “adding” to the law. This position has no basis in reality. The standards of originality, research and academic honesty that guide the production of doctoral dissertations in legal studies are the same as in all other social sciences.

Q3. Significance. What would be the outcome and impact if one of your colleagues published a similar work? (You may think of any conceivable sanctions or impact on research, institution, public perception etc.)

A case of such extensive plagiarism is unthinkable in any of the academic institutions with which I am familiar. Such plagiarism would be easily identified by the dissertation advisor, who is supposed to be an expert or at least very familiar with the scholarship in the field, and it would also be immediately flagged by even rudimentary anti-plagiarism software. Therefore, answering your question about outcome and impact requires a serious exercise of imagination. The author’s academic career would obviously be over. His PhD title would be withdrawn and he would be likely be fired from any academic position. This plagiarism would also have serious consequences for all senior scholars who approved the awarding of this PhD degree. The advisor who recommended the thesis for defense would probably be summoned before the University’s ethics committee and possibly face the sanction of having his right to supervise future doctoral work suspended. The members of the dissertation jury would also be called to provide explanations. Such quick and forceful action would be required in order to protect the reputation of the university.

The doctoral dissertation does not comply with ethical norms in my field. It contains a considerable amount of paragraphs and pages copied from other sources. These numerous parts are not quoted and can be found in over 100 pages. Therefore the reader is frequently misled about their original author, a feature that characterizes plagiarism.

Q2. The grey zone. Does the material include writing techniques that are controversial in your field but cannot be qualified fully and clearly as academic misconduct?

The author extensively draws whole paragraphs word for word from sources that remain unquoted. Furthermore a source material written in English is translated into Romanian and appears in the dissertation without any mark or information allowing to identify its original author. This constitutes a clear verbatim and translated plagiarism case.

Q3. Significance. What would be the outcome and impact if one of your colleagues published a similar work? (You may think of any conceivable sanctions or impact on research, institution, public perception etc.)

The academic title would be withdrawn and the reputation of the colleague seriously damaged. An academic position derived from the title would be reconsidered, as would be the salary if based on it.

The submitted material is in clear violation of the ethical norms in my field. The thesis contains extensive materials copied word-for-word from publications by other authors without the proper use of quotations and footnotes that would indicate which part of the manuscript is original and which draws on outside sources. Technically, even a few sentences that contain unattributed ideas would qualify as plagiarism and this would be the case even if the wording has been changed significantly as long as the ideas and key concepts are being used without proper attribution. There, the incorporation in this manuscript of several dozen pages worth of uncited materials lifted word-for-word (or with at best minor word changes) from a small number of sources (see e.g. the use of long passages from Diaconu 1999 on pp. 30-39, and from Diaconu (1999) and Cretu (1996) on pp. 54-63) would qualify as a particularly egregious case of plagiarism.

Q2. The grey zone. Does the material include writing techniques that are controversial in your field but cannot be qualified fully and clearly as academic misconduct?

The often very complicated issue of grey zone plagiarism is less important in this case given the existence of multiple and extensive instances of verbatim uncited incorporation of entire passages from other sources mentioned above in Q1.

Q2. Significance. What would be the outcome and impact if one of your colleagues published a similar work? (You may think of any conceivable sanctions or impact on research, institution, public perception etc.)

The academic reputation and public perception of a person committing such extensive plagiarism would be severely damaged. The sanctions are usually decided by a university-appointed panel and depend on the extent and severity of the plagiarism and the academic position of the person committing the offence. At my institution, Princeton University, in the case of doctoral students, plagiarism on this scale would lead to expulsion from the program, or, if the degree has already been granted to a revocation of the degree. For faculty, the expectation would be that a person found guilty of this type of plagiarism would resign from their position. If the faculty does not resign, then University rules allow for the faculty member to be “suspended, dismissed, or be subjected to discriminatory reduction of salary” depending on the gravity of the offense, and in this case the most likely outcome would be outright dismissal, i.e. termination of the contract. It is worth noting that in American academia plagiarism on this scale can have disciplinary repercussions not only for the student engaging in plagiarism but also for any advisors who are aware of the practice and do not take the appropriate steps to correct the situation.

Unfortunately, it does not comply with any ethical norms, by any stretch of imagination. If an undergraduate student would plagiarize to this extent, most likely she or he would be expulsed from the college/university. All Honor Codes that I am familiar with in the United States have zero tolerance for this practice, including the ones where the words are not verbatim or the plagiarism was done ‘in good faith’, accidentally. Obviously, none of the two categories apply to this case.

In the case of PhD students, the procedure distinguishes between plagiarism from a source within the public domain and plagiarism from other sources. If the unacknowledged material comes from a source in the public domain – which is this case -, the principle of ‘absolute liability’ is to be applied whether or not she or he has intended to behave dishonestly.

Furthermore, a doctoral student may not use as a defense the failure by the supervisor (or any other member of the academic staff) to detect academic misconduct at an earlier stage. In such cases, depending on the gravity of the case, the penalties vary from exclusion of the affected work from consideration, to re-examination, or termination of the candidature.

Q2. The grey zone. Does the material include writing techniques that are controversial in your field but cannot be qualified fully and clearly as academic misconduct?

There are indeed cases that are controversial and the members of the board committee may disagree on the final verdict. But once again, this is a clear-cut case of verbatim reproduction extended over some one hundred pages or so.

Q2. Significance. What would be the outcome and impact if one of your colleagues published a similar work? (You may think of any conceivable sanctions or impact on research, institution, public perception etc.)

This is a hardly conceivable situation. However, if something like this would happen, the respective individual would be banished from the academic community, no questions asked. Any university is ‘worth’ only as much as the general public thinks it is, and a case of obvious plagiarism left unpunished would damage the reputation on the institution irreversibly.

What I found worrisome in the particular case of Victor Ponta is the message sent out: political might makes academic right. No educational system can survive on such premises.

The thesis and various reports issued by University of Bucharest and experts other than CNESCDTI concur, as do I, that this thesis can be categorized indubitably as academic misconduct. At Indiana University, where I have been teaching since 1996, presenting the “cut and paste” compilation of unattributed descriptions, analysis, and syntheses to the extent that they are present in the PhD thesis under discussion would result in dismissal of that PhD candidate from the University for academic misconduct.

Q2. The grey zone. Does the material include writing techniques that are controversial in your field but cannot be qualified fully and clearly as academic misconduct?

I did not find a gray zone, especially in areas where exact wording, to the point of the same grammatical structure of sentences and use of commas, makes it extremely clear that the exact same text is being presented in 2003 as one’s work, while the text had already been published a year or more prior to Victor Ponta’s thesis. While one isolated occurrence of such an unattributed quote, forgetting also to use quotation marks, might be forgiven, numerous instances, especially of an analytical and synthetic nature, rather than just descriptive, clearly show that the author presented someone else’s interpretation of the problem being addressed as his own.

Q2. Significance. What would be the outcome and impact if one of your colleagues published a similar work? (You may think of any conceivable sanctions or impact on research, institution, public perception etc.)

Very recently, Fareek Zakaria was suspended by Time Magazine for plagiarizing the work of Jill Lapore, a contributor to the New Yorker. In an academic environment, a faculty member would be brought up for academic misconduct, and depending on the magnitude of the level of plagiarism,
could be fired or denied tenure.