Ayres has previously served as a research fellow of the American Bar Foundation and has clerked for James K. Logan of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.
[7] Ayres has published eight books and over 100 articles in law reviews and magazines on a variety of subjects, and has been ranked as one of the 250 most prolific and most-cited legal scholars of his generation.
[10] On October 4, the Yale Daily News reported that it had found nine passages in the book, some more than a couple paragraphs long, that were identical or similar to those in the Times and four other publications.
[11] In reference to Ayres's case and a similar one in Illinois, George Washington University professor of English Margaret Soltan wrote in Inside Higher Ed: "Both men simply stuck passages from other writers into their text when it suited them, and gave either minimal or no attribution.
"[12] After some controversy over three weeks, Ayres apologized and said: "in several brief instances in the book, my language is too close to the sourced material and I should have used quotation marks to set it apart from my text."
"[12] Professors at other universities were quite critical of Ayres's explanation and pointed out that the method used by the Yale Daily News to discover plagiarized passages was unlikely to catch them all.