The 83-year-old Abraham, who is retired from his post as a law professor at the University of Virginia, could not be reached for comment yesterday.

But both Ogletree and Dershowitz jumped to defend their colleague from the charges leveled against him.

Ogletree, speaking to The Crimson yesterday, dismissed The Standard’s allegations against Tribe as “nonsense.”

“I think Larry [Tribe] may be overreacting,” Dershowitz said yesterday, when asked whether Tribe was right to apologize. “Abraham sat on this story for 20 years. If he had a gripe, he should have written to Larry 20 years ago.”

Abraham told The Standard last week that Tribe’s failure to credit his sources did not come as a surprise.

“I was aware of what Tribe was doing when I first read his book,” Abraham told The Standard. “But I chose not to do anything at the time. I’ve never confronted him—and I was wrong in not following it up. I should have done something about it.”

Abraham told The Standard that Tribe is “a big mahatma and thinks he can get away with this sort of thing.”

But the former dean of Stanford Law School said yesterday that The Standard’s allegations should not tarnish Tribe’s reputation.

“Tribe’s towering contributions to the field of constitutional law over four decades should not be overshadowed by this episode,” the dean, Kathleen M. Sullivan, wrote in an e-mail. Sullivan was Tribe’s colleague on the Harvard faculty from 1984 to 1993.

Dershowitz said yesterday that The Standard’s charges against Tribe were politically motivated.

“Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime,” Dershowitz said—a quotation he attributed to Soviet spymaster Lavrenti Beria. “Clearly someone was looking to pin something on the most prominent liberal constitutional scholar in the country.”

Tribe joined the Harvard Law faculty in 1968 and quickly entered the spotlight as an eloquent advocate for liberal causes. He has argued three dozen cases in front of the Supreme Court—famously representing Vice President Albert J. Gore Jr. ’69 in the December 2000 Florida recount dispute.

Dershowitz said that Tribe’s 1985 book was an effective element of “the Democratic arsenal” as liberals tried to block Ronald Reagan’s right-wing judicial nominations.

“It worked, and the Right has been pissed at Tribe ever since,” said Dershowitz.

Dershowitz called yesterday for stricter University guidelines on source citations and the use of research assistants so that scholars could avoid ideologically motivated charges of plagiarism in the future.