Plagiarism (noun): the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.
Voters may be surprised to know a few years ago investigators revealed 10,163 legislative bills were plagiarized during an eight year time period with over 2,100 of the copycat bills signed into law.
An investigation of law origination was conducted by over 30 USA Today and Arizona Republic reporters. They examined about one million bills throughout America and the U.S. Congress via 150 computers programmed to detect similarities in language. The Center for Public Integrity “identified tens of thousands of bills with identical phrases, [and] then traced the origins of that language in dozens of those bills across the country.”
