After reading the article carefully, I'd call it plagiarism, plain and simple. Usually plagiarism involves copying large blocks of text. But if, as Bottum claims, Tribe did this numerous further times, then there's no getting around it. He stole a large part of his book from Abraham without even a semblance of proper acknowledgment.
Blaming it on research assistants is nonsense. If you use a research assistant, it's your job to check the work. For one thing, I would never trust a transcription of some passage, I would want a photocopy. For another, this is not taken from some obscure source, it was taken from one of the best known books on the subject which I'm sure Tribe had on his own bookshelf.
Someone whom I prefer not to name once appropriated some very basic ideas from one of my books, which she happened to have seen before publication in typescript. On the basis of the resulting book, she was offered a tenured position at Cornell. I think she got away with it because her book was more politically correct than mine. To say the least, it was annoying.
But in the case of someone like Tribe, who was responsible for the borking of Bork and no doubt the questionably constitutional stonewalling of Bush's judicial nominees over the past four years, this story deserves to be widely made known.
Judges and judicial advisers are supposed to be above suspicion. Tribe clearly fails the test. His scholarship and his judicial opinions clearly cannot be trusted after this revelation of his fundamental dishonesty.
Ping!