Alleged Plagiarist Mounts Blistering Attack on Foes

The embattled dean of a Santa Ana law school, accused of plagiarizing other works in a fall 2000 law review article about human rights, denied any wrongdoing Tuesday even as new questions arose about another, unpublished manuscript he wrote in 1996 on the same subject.

Winston L. Frost, who was suspended with pay in July from Trinity Law School, answered his accusers in a blistering 14-page reply, in which he suggests that the charges were first made because of personality differences with staff members at the small Christian school and that he is the victim of bad editing by law review editors there.

“The law review article . . . does indeed contain incorrect and incomplete footnotes. . . . The paper was never intended for publication,” Frost wrote. “Put simply, at no point in that article did I claim someone else’s work as my own.”

His letter also accuses school officials of unchristian behavior.

Trinity’s investigation of the “baseless allegations” against him is a “gross dereliction of its Christian and legal duty,” Frost wrote, adding that the school is denying him the Christian measure of being able to face his accusers.

Trinity International University Provost Barry J. Beitzel, who is supervising the school’s investigation of Frost, did not return telephone calls seeking comment Tuesday.

The university is the parent institution of the law school. Messages left for the law review’s editors and the publication’s faculty advisor were not returned either.

Lawyer Cites ‘a Big Disagreement’

School officials are investigating allegations that Frost lifted text from the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a 1983 article about the history of human rights written by Jerome J. Shestack, a Philadelphia lawyer who has served as president of the American Bar Assn. and U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. Last week, Shestack accused Frost of copying from his article.

Officials are also investigating a complaint from British law professor John W. Montgomery, who said Frost cited his book in the article’s footnotes but did not use any material from it.

Instead, Montgomery said, the information apparently came from the encyclopedia.

Tom Borchard, Frost’s attorney, said he and Trinity’s lawyers “have a big disagreement” over whether Frost committed plagiarism.

“It’s not plagiarism. It’s not work that Frost is passing off as his work product,” the lawyer said.

He suggested that both sides are far apart in their talks to resolve the issue.

“But I’m still looking for a constructive resolve for all this, to benefit the students and Frost,” Borchard said.

He said that although Frost had not originally written the material in the law review article for publication, he later provided it to the editors for Trinity Law Review’s fall 2000 issue. Borchard said that Frost made the student editors aware “that there were footnote problems.”

“He told them this was a working piece that he had used from time to time” as class lecture notes or for presentations, Borchard said. “Over the years, he had added and deleted information from it. He told the editors that they had to verify footnotes.”

Frost’s written response said his article was not the only one in the review with problems. He said there were numerous editing errors throughout the publication.

“By all accounts, the editing of the fall 2000 edition of the law review was a complete disaster,” he said.

Among those errors, he said, was the incorrect citing of Montgomery’s book as a source of information.

“Those [Montgomery] footnotes are simply wrong,” Frost wrote. “I never authorized those footnotes. They were created solely by the law review.”

However, a previous paper written by Frost but never published shows similar characteristics. The 130-page paper titled “God, Justice and Human Rights,” written in 1996, cited Montgomery’s book “Human Rights and Human Dignity” in a footnote, but the text he cited is similar to what appears in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Wrongly Attributed Footnotes Blamed

Speaking about the 1996 manuscript, attorney Borchard said Frost was not denying that portions of the paper were identical to parts of Shestack’s article. He said the law school dean had wrongly attributed the footnotes.

The controversy over the alleged plagiarism flared in July, when law school staff alerted officials at Trinity International University about the similarities in Frost’s article and the encyclopedia.

Later, a faculty member told Shestack of the similarities between his article and Frost’s law review piece.

Frost’s article, “The Development of Human Rights Discourse: A History of the Human Rights Movement,” has numerous similarities to the encyclopedia and to Shestack’s article, “The Jurisprudence of Human Rights.”

Large sections of the 1996 manuscript are similar or identical to the text about human rights in the 1986 edition of the New Encyclopaedia Britannica and Shestack’s 1983 article, though those two sources are never cited in the footnotes.

For example, Frost’s 1996 report says, “And Jurist John Austin and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein insisted respectively that the only law is ‘the command of the sovereign’ and that the only truth is that which can be established by verifiable experience.”

Frost attributes the text to a book published in the Netherlands, but the same wording appears in the encyclopedia.

In the 1996 manuscript, Frost wrote, “Bentham’s ‘happiness principle’ enjoyed enormous popularity and influence and during the 19th century, as most reformers spoke the language of utilitarianism.”

He cited a 1986 Princeton University book, but the same text appears in Shestack’s 1983 article.

Borchard argued that if Frost failed to cite Shestack’s work it was because of footnoting errors, not refusal to acknowledge his sources.

“You’re not going to find anything in [the dean’s two written pieces] that has Frost taking credit for someone else’s work. Instead, you’ll find footnotes attributed to someone who doesn’t deserve the credit,” said Borchard.

Frost’s lawyers provided his written response to The Times, but lawyers for the university said they had not received a copy and declined to comment.