More Pow Wow Chow Plagiarism From Elizabeth Warren's Husband?

A reader at Professor William Jacobson’s Legal Insurrection blog has offered convincing evidence that Elizabeth Warren’s husband, Bruce Mann, also contributed a plagiarized recipe to the infamous Pow Wow Chow cookbook. Subtitled A Collection of Recipes from Families of the Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek & Seminole, the cookbook was edited by Warren’s cousin, Candy Rowsey, and first published in 1984. 

As Breitbart News reported earlier, Ms. Warren contributed at least two recipes to the cookbook that were word for word copies of previously published recipes. Now, it appears her husband may have done the same thing. His Pow Wow Chow recipe for banana nut bread merely raises concerns about the use of bananas as a “traditional” Cherokee ingredient. His recipe for oriental beef stir-fry, which includes that well known “traditional” Cherokee ingredient of soy sauce cooked in a “traditional” Cherokee wok, suggests the possibility of potential plagiarism.

The oriental beef stir-fry recipe appeared in a small local newspaper, the Oswego Palladium (New York), virtually word for word in 1983, a year prior to the publication of the Pow Wow Chow cookbook. You can see the recipe as published by the Palladium in 1983 here and compare it to Mr. Mann’s 1984 Pow Wow Chow contribution here. The only differences between the Palladium’s 1983 recipe for oriental beef stir-fry and Mr. Mann’s 1984 Pow Wow Chow recipe for oriental beef stir-fry are the order of the ingredients, the exclusion of the parenthetical description “about two cups” in the “8 ounces of small mushrooms” ingredient, and the addition of the word “makes” at the beginning of the last sentence of the instructions “5 to 6 servings.”

Every contributor of a Pow Wow Chow recipe also indicated the tribe their family claimed. Both Ms. Warren and her husband, Bruce Mann, claimed Cherokee heritage in their contributions. Presumably, Mr. Mann’s claim to Cherokee tribe membership came via his marriage to Ms. Warren. Unlike Ms. Warren, Mr. Mann does not appear to claim descent from a Cherokee ancestor.

Elizabeth Warren and Bruce Mann were married in 1980. At the time Mr. Mann was a rising legal scholar with an impressive academic pedigree (Brown undergraduate, Yale Phd. and J.D.). Ms. Warren was an unknown professor of law at the University of Houston with a J.D. from the much less prestigious Rutgers University-Newark Law School. In 1981, both Warren and Mann joined the faculty at the University of Texas Law School, and in 1987 Warren joined Mann at the University of Pennsylvania Law School as a “trailing spouse.” By 1993, however, when Harvard Law School offered Warren a tenured position, she had become the legal star of the family. Her husband didn’t join her at Harvard Law School until 2007.

Michael Patrick Leahy is a Breitbart News contributor, Editor of Broadside Books’ Voices of the Tea Party e-book series, and author of  Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement.