In 2009, Kamala Harris co-authored a book called Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer. Its purpose was to outline her criminal justice policies in advance of her campaign for California attorney general.
The book has attracted the attention of conservative writer and activist Christopher Rufo, who contends that Harris and co-author Joan O'C. Hamilton plagiarized several passages. Rufo's analysis—which relies on the work of Stefan Weber, a noted exposer of plagiarism—finds that there are at least 12 sections of the book in which sentences or entire paragraphs were copied from another source without proper attribution.
