Elizabeth Warren's Crappy Scholarship

Elizabeth Warren insists that her appointment at Harvard Law School had nothing to do with her fraudulent claim of Indian ancestry. Well, it almost had nothing to do with her scholarship.

Harvard Law School hired Elizabeth Warren as a Visiting Professor in the fall of 1992, then offered her a full-time tenured faculty position in February 1993, despite a withering 1990 critique of the academic standards used in the 1989 book she co-authored. The critique was made by one of the nation’s leading legal scholars in personal bankruptcy at the time.

In 1990, Rutgers University Law School Professor Philip Shuchman wrote a review of As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America, the 1989 book Ms. Warren co-authored with Teresa Sullivan and Jay Westbrook. In his review, “Social Science Research on Bankruptcy,” published in the 43rd volume of the Rutgers Law Review (pages 185-244), Professor Shuchman assailed Ms. Warren’s academic credibility in a lengthy article that culminated in this hard-hitting charge (see page 187):

Most of their study replicates several earlier research publications. These are hardly mentioned. The writers make extravagant and false claims to originality and priority of research. There appear to be serious errors in their use of statistical bases which result in grossly mistaken functions and comparisons. Some of their conclusions cannot be obtained even from their flawed findings. The authors have made their raw data unavailable so that its accuracy cannot be independently checked. In my opinion, the authors have engaged in repeated instances of scientific misconduct. [emphasis added]