Last week, in the wake of General Conference, there was a mini-scandal: it appears that in Elder Bednar’s talk “Put on Thy Strength, O Zion,” he borrowed his interpretation of a parable from a 2016 article, sometimes even using that author’s precise words. He didn’t flag his intellectual debt in the oral version of his talk, though, and the original published version also failed to use quotation marks or footnotes for many of the ideas.

Now, I realize I’m idiosyncratic, but the first person who comes to mind when I hear about a plagiarism scandal is my friend and colleague Brian Frye, Dogecoin Professor of Law & Grifting Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky Rosenberg College of Law.

Professor Frye is the preeminent plagiarism apologist in the legal academy. And his apologia pro plagiarism forces us to confront the question, why is plagiarism wrong? While the answer seems self-evident, he makes it clear that the question of the wrong of plagiarism is a lot murkier and harder to pin down.