A Harvard law school professor slated to speak at a Police conference to be held on the Island in November has been charged with plagiarism according to an overseas news report.

A recent book by Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a law professor at Harvard and Vice Dean of Clinical Programmes, includes a six-paragraph passage lifted almost directly from another author?s work, Mr. Ogletree and the school acknowledged this week.

In an article published in the Boston Globe newspaper, Mr. Ogletree said the inclusion of the passage from a book by Yale Law School professor Jack M. Balkin was the result of editing mistakes in drafts of his book ?All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education?.

?I made a serious mistake during the editorial process of completing this book, and delegated too much responsibility to others during the final editing process,? he wrote in a statement posted on the Harvard law school website.

Mr. Ogletree, whose background is in race and criminal justice, has written numerous books and was named by The National Law Journal as one of its ?100 most Influential Lawyers in America?.

He is set to speak with other policy and decision makers from the Caribbean and the UK Overseas Territories about the creation of a Police Complaints Authority. The conference, which runs between November 18-22, is being sponsored by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Bermuda Government. Its purpose is to examine issues and legislative concerns involved in establishing and running a successful Police Complaints Authority, according to a Government statement sent to last month.

Mr. Ogletree said that he will face discipline from Harvard, but refused to specify the nature of the discipline according to the report.

Law school spokesman Mike Armini told the it was school policy not to discuss discipline. The passage came from Balkin?s 2001 book, ?What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said?.

Mr. Ogletree said the problem came about when one research assistant inserted the quotation from Balkin in a draft of the book, believing that another assistant would review and summarise it. The closing quotation mark was inadvertently dropped, according to Mr. Ogletree.

A second assistant, under deadline pressure, deleted the attribution to Balkin, and Mr. Ogletree who said he reviewed the draft, did not recognise that he had not written the passage.

?There is no one to blame but me,? Mr. Ogletree stated in the article.