"Ghostwriting has debased the intellectual currency in circulation," snapped Justice Robert Jackson, "and is a type of counterfeiting which invites no defense. But has any man before ever been disciplined or even reprimanded for it? And will any be hereafter?"
Jackson was dissenting sharply from a Supreme Court ruling last week, disbarring an aged patent lawyer from practice before the U.S. Patent Office because he had submitted a ghostwritten article as evidence. He was also pointing up an old Washington custom: ghostwriters had become as much a part of the furniture of modern government as the Mimeograph machine. Many a...