United States Court of Appeals 

For the First Circuit 

No. 15-1154 

MEGON WALKER, 

Plaintiff, Appellant, 

v. 

PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE, also known as 

Harvard Corporation, ELLEN COSGROVE, LLOYD WEINREB, 

Defendants, Appellees, 

BRADLEY HAMBURGER, LINDSAY KITZINGER, 

Defendants. 

APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT 

FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS 

[Hon. Rya W. Zobel, U.S. District Judge] 

Before 

Thompson and Kayatta, Circuit Judges, 

and Mastroianni,* District Judge. 

John J.E. Markham, II, for appellant. 

Daryl J. Lapp, with whom Elizabeth H. Kelley was on 

brief, for appellee. 

October 24, 2016 

 * Of the District of Massachusetts, sitting by designation. 
- 2 - 

MASTROIANNI, District Judge. Between 2006 and 2009 Megon 

Walker ("Walker") attended Harvard Law School ("HLS"). Walker was 

a member of the staff of a student-run law journal, the Journal of 

Law and Technology ("JOLT"). During her final semester at HLS, 

Walker delivered a draft article (the "Note") to senior staff of 

JOLT. After concerns arose among the senior staff regarding the 

Note, an investigation was launched by HLS. The HLS Administrative 

Board (the "Board") subsequently held a hearing and found the Note 

contained plagiarism in violation of the HLS Handbook of Academic 

Policies (the "Handbook"). Walker received a formal reprimand and 

a notation regarding the matter was added to her transcript. 

Despite the reprimand, Walker graduated on time from HLS. However, 

after the notation was placed on her transcript, at least one law 

firm rescinded a lucrative offer of employment. 

Seeking to have the notation removed from her 

transcript, Walker initiated this suit asserting claims for breach 

of contract and defamation against the President and Fellows of 

Harvard College ("Harvard")1; Ellen Cosgrove ("Cosgrove"), thenDean of Students at HLS; and Lloyd Weinreb, a Professor at HLS and 

Chair of the Board in 2009 (together "Defendants").2 After the 

 1 This entity has ultimate authority over HLS and the 

conferral of degrees. 

2 Initially, the two students who were co-Editors-in-Chief of 

JOLT, Bradley Hamburger ("Hamburger") and Lindsay Kitzinger 

("Kitzinger"), were also named as defendants. Walker filed a 
- 3 - 

completion of discovery and a stipulation of dismissal as to some 

claims, Defendants filed their Motion for Summary Judgment. The 

district court granted summary judgment for Defendants on all 

counts and dismissed the action. Walker has appealed the ruling 

on two of the counts. After reviewing the issues de novo, we 

affirm. 

I. Background

Walker initiated this suit in May 2012. Jurisdiction is 

based on diversity and the claims are brought under Massachusetts 

law. Four counts were pending when Defendants filed their Motion 

for Summary Judgment: Count I – breach of contract against Harvard 

based on the Board's finding that Walker had sufficiently 

"submitted" the Note for it to be covered by the Handbook; Count 

II – breach of contract against Harvard based on alleged failures 

of the Board to comply with provisions in the Handbook; Count IV 

– defamation based on the inclusion of the plagiarism findings in 

Walker's HLS transcript; and Count VI – asserting an entitlement 

to injunctive relief.3 Walker has appealed only the district 

court's grant of summary judgment as to Counts I and IV. We, 

 

stipulation of dismissal as to all claims against them before 

Defendants filed their Motion for Summary Judgment. 

3 Count III and Count V were resolved by stipulation of 

dismissal before the motion for summary judgment was filed. 
- 4 - 

therefore, set out the facts we deem relevant to those counts in 

the light most favorable to her and draw all reasonable inferences 

in her favor. See Martinez v. Petrenko, 792 F.3d 173, 175 (1st 

Cir. 2015). 

A. Preparation of the Note 

As a first year student at HLS, Walker joined the staff 

of JOLT. Walker first worked as a "sub-citer," checking citations 

against their original source material. During her last year of 

law school, Walker applied to write a comment for JOLT on a 

recently decided patent case. Her application was accepted and 

she commenced work on the comment, which was to be published in 

the spring of her third year. 

Upon acceptance of her application, JOLT informed Walker 

that an initial complete draft of the Note would be due on February 

1, 2009. The deadline for the final draft of the Note was February 

22, 2009. Walker understood that the piece she turned in on (or 

after) the February 22, 2009 deadline would be subjected to the 

rigorous editing and citation-checking process she had helped with 

as a sub-citer. As that process normally unfolded, an author was 

not permitted to make changes to an article during the editing and 

citation-checking process. At the conclusion of that process, 

authors were permitted to make limited changes prior to 

publication. 
- 5 - 

Walker delivered a first draft of the Note to JOLT on 

February 2, 2009. She turned in a second draft on February 8, 

2009, and a third draft on February 16, 2009. Around the time the 

third draft was due, Walker began experiencing problems with her 

laptop. On the day she sent the third draft to JOLT, her laptop 

was infected with a computer virus. While working on her computer 

with IT support, Walker saw Anna Volfstun ("Volfstun"), JOLT's 

Submissions Editor. She told Volfstun about the virus and 

explained that due to the virus, the Note would require significant 

additional work to be made ready for publication. The next day, 

on February 17, 2009, Walker attended a JOLT student writing 

committee meeting where she discussed the virus causing her to 

lose data from her computer. 

On February 20, 2009, Doug Kochelek ("Kochelek"), the 

JOLT editor in charge of student articles, sent an email to remind 

Walker and other students their final draft articles were due on 

February 22, 2009. Kochelek said the articles would be "subcited" 

the following weekend before being returned "after spring break 

for [authors'] last round of review with opportunity for changes." 

Walker responded, via email, on February 22, 2009: "I doubt that 

I can send [the Note] before 10 tonight. Footnotes and 

proofreading are taking all weekend." When Kochelek asked Walker 

when she would be sending the Note, she replied it would be that 
- 6 - 

night. She also wrote "I'm over the length limit again and cutting 

more." 

B. Concerns Regarding the Note 

On February 24, 2009, two days after Walker said she 

would send the Note to JOLT, she sent an email to Kochelek and 

other JOLT senior staff, which read: "Here's the latest draft of 

the . . . piece. Sorry about the delay. Let me know if you have 

difficulty finding any sources." The piece was still over the 

word limit. Walker subsequently met with Andrew Ungberg 

("Ungberg"), the line editor responsible for part of the citationchecking process. During that meeting Walker gave Ungberg two 

electronic files that contained versions of her sources obtained 

from Westlaw. She told Ungberg about the virus on her computer, 

indicating her draft had problems, including issues with citations 

and quotations, and she would need to "go back to the sources and 

compare the arguments . . . and quotations." Walker also sent an 

email to JOLT staff on February 27, 2009, stating that she 

continued to work on the Note after having provided the final draft 

on February 24, 2009.

In early March, when JOLT staff began editing the Note, 

concerns arose that much of Walker's argument was derivative of 

the dissent in the case about which she was writing. The Article 

Editor for the Note prepared a summary of the draft for comparison 
- 7 - 

with other publications and Ungberg compared the Note with the 

dissent from the case. On March 11, 2009, Volftsun, the JOLT 

staffer who had spoken with Walker at the IT Help area on February 

16, 2009, sent an email offering to help Walker fix issues with 

the Note. Around the same time, Hamburger used Google to run 

searches on full sentences from the Note. He created an annotated 

version of the Note showing which sentences were copied from other 

sources. He stopped after documenting 23 instances. In midMarch, Hamburger and Kitzinger discussed their attribution 

concerns with Walker and then with Cosgrove, the Dean of Students. 

C. HLS Review and Disciplinary Process 

Cosgrove referred the Note to the Board, which reviewed 

the matter and considered whether to move forward with a charge of 

plagiarism. The plagiarism policy of HLS reads in part as follows: 

All work submitted by a student for any academic or nonacademic exercise is expected to be the student's own 

work. In the preparation of their work, students should 

always take great care to distinguish their own ideas 

and knowledge from information derived from sources. . 

. . Students who submit work that is not their own 

without clear attribution of all sources, even if 

inadvertently, will be subject to disciplinary action. 

After the Board voted to move forward with the plagiarism 

charge, Walker was notified. The Board consulted with Walker's 

attorneys and scheduled a hearing for May 7, 2009. Although Walker 
- 8 - 

sought to resolve the situation without a hearing, she was told 

the plagiarism charge was too serious to be resolved informally. 

Following the hearing, the Board issued Walker a formal reprimand 

which ultimately appeared on her transcript and caused the loss of 

an employment offer.4

II. Standard of Review 

 "Summary judgment is appropriate when the record shows 

that 'there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the 

movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.'" Farmers Ins. 

Exch. v. RNK, Inc., 632 F.3d 777, 782 (1st Cir. 2011) (quoting 

Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(a)). "A genuine issue is one that can 'be 

resolved in favor of either party' and a material fact is one which 

'has the potential of affecting the outcome of the case.'" Gerald 

v. Univ. of P.R., 707 F.3d 7, 16 (1st Cir. 2013) (quoting Pérez–

Cordero v. Wal–Mart P.R., Inc., 656 F.3d 19, 25 (1st Cir. 2011)). 

"We review de novo the grant of a motion for summary judgment." 

Farmers Ins. Exch., 632 F.3d at 782. "[W]e may affirm the entry 

of summary judgment on any ground made manifest by the record, so 

long as the record reveals that there is no genuine issue as to 

any material fact and that the moving party is entitled to judgment 

 4 Suspension is the normal punishment following a finding of 

plagiarism. 
- 9 - 

as a matter of law." Batista v. Cooperativa De Vivienda Jardines 

De San Ignacio, 776 F.3d 38, 42 (1st Cir. 2015) (citations 

omitted). 

III. Discussion 

The parties agree the Student Handbook sets out the terms 

of a contract between Walker and HLS. We proceed under that 

assumption, applying Massachusetts law to interpret the Handbook.5 

See Cloud v. Trs. of Boston Univ., 720 F.2d 721, 724 (1st Cir. 

1983); Schaer, 735 N.E.2d at 378. 

Where, as here, a private-school student or former 

student sues a school alleging breach of contract, the standard of 

reasonable expectation applies. Schaer, 735 N.E.2d at 378; see 

also Driscoll, 873 N.E.2d at 1185-86. Under this reasonable 

expectation standard, courts ask, in interpreting the contractual 

 5 Because HLS does not dispute that the Handbook sets out the 

terms of a contract, we assume without deciding that a contract 

exists. We note, however, that while courts have treated student 

handbooks as contracts between students and schools, the question 

of whether such a document always constitutes a contract is, 

arguably, an unsettled issue under Massachusetts law. Compare 

Pacella v. Tufts Univ. Sch. of Dental Med., 66 F. Supp. 2d 234, 

240 (D. Mass. 1999) (noting that "[w]hether a student handbook can 

supply the terms of the contract between a university and its 

students is unclear under Massachusetts law"), with Driscoll v. 

Bd. of Trs. of Milton Acad., 873 N.E.2d 1177, 1185 (Mass. App. Ct. 

2007) (deciding to treat school’s student handbook as a contract); 

see also Schaer v. Brandeis Univ., 735 N.E.2d 373, 378 (Mass. 2000) 

(assuming without deciding that the student handbook gave rise to 

a contractual relationship between the student and the school). 
- 10 - 

terms, "what meaning the party making the manifestation, the 

university, should reasonably expect the other party [, the 

student,] to give it." Schaer, 735 N.E.2d at 378 (quoting Cloud, 

720 F.2d at 724). A breach of contract is established if the facts 

show that the university has "failed to meet [the student's] 

reasonable expectations." Id. 

Walker argues here, as she did below, that she reasonably 

expected that the word "submit" in the HLS plagiarism policy meant 

yielding or surrendering completed work to the will of another. 

The record, she asserts, establishes that, although she acquiesced 

to the JOLT senior staff's demands and emailed them her incomplete 

draft, she intended at some point in the future to go back and 

insert the missing citations.6 No student in her shoes, Walker 

claims, would reasonably have expected that turning in a draft in 

 6 We credit Walker's claims that she only emailed her draft 

to JOLT senior staff when they insisted, saying, "We need your 

draft. . . . [E]very other student author has gotten their piece 

in", and that her communications with the student editors made it 

otherwise clear that she intended to continue to make changes. 

Specifically, on February 22 (the original deadline for the 

Note), Walker told the student editors in an email, "I doubt that 

I can send it before 10 tonight. Footnotes and proofreading are 

taking all weekend," and on February 24, as she finally prepared 

to send in the Note two days late, she emailed to say, "ok, sending 

it out now. All the sources are included, but I'm still moving 

words around," and then later described the attached document as 

"the latest draft" (and not the final draft). Finally, on February 

27, after the Note was turned in, Walker emailed again to ask, 

"I'm still getting comments/feedback from partners at [a law firm]. 

If I send a revised copy TONIGHT, [i]s that too late??? . . . Did 

you guys pull sources already?" 
- 11 - 

such an incomplete state would have constituted "submitting" the 

draft for purposes of the plagiarism policy. But even viewing all 

the facts in the light most favorable to Walker, we conclude that 

no student could reasonably have believed that the HLS plagiarism 

policy did not apply to her February 24 Note, and thus summary 

judgment for HLS was proper. 

By its terms, the HLS plagiarism policy applied to "[a]ll 

work submitted by a student for any academic or non-academic 

exercise," regardless of intent. The policy uses the qualifier 

"all" to modify the phrase "work submitted," and goes so far as to 

state that the plagiarism ban applies, even if an attribution error 

was "inadvertent[]." Given such broad language, we think it clear 

that the plagiarism policy applied to Walker’s work turned in for 

the exercise of preparing a student note for publication, 

regardless of whether the work was in draft or final form. 

Even if, as Walker argues, the facts establish that she, 

indeed, believed her Note was badly incomplete, they do not 

establish that a student could reasonably expect that the words 

"[a]ll work submitted" exempted such an incomplete draft. There is 

no evidence, for example, that the terms "[a]ll work submitted" 

were "word[s] of art," or that they otherwise had "acquired any 

secondary meaning" in this context. Lyons v. Salve Regina Coll., 

565 F.2d 200, 203 (1st Cir. 1977) (applying the reasonable 

expectation standard to a Rhode Island case involving a student 
- 12 - 

manual dispute between a student and a college). The evidence 

proffered by Walker proves only that her own intentions were to go 

back and insert attributions for the uncited passages. It does 

not establish any "rational basis for believing that the word[s in 

the plagiarism policy] . . . meant anything other than [their] 

normal, everyday meaning." Id. at 202-03. 

Thus, because the record, even viewed in the light most 

favorable to Walker, gives us no basis on which a reasonable 

student could have interpreted the words "[a]ll work submitted" 

any differently, we give them their plain meaning here. In this 

case, Walker turned in the fourth draft of her Note (the draft in 

question) to JOLT senior staff for citation checks. Unlike with 

her preliminary drafts, this draft was slated to go directly into 

the subciting process, and there was to be no opportunity to make 

changes until the post-check "author edit" period at the end of 

March. No reasonable student could have expected that turning in 

a draft, even a woefully incomplete one, for this citation-check 

deadline did not constitute "submitting" the draft for the exercise 

of student publication. 

Finally, to the extent that Walker argues that her 

communications with JOLT senior staff, in which the editors 

acknowledged that her draft was in rough shape, gave her reason to 

expect that the HLS plagiarism policy would not apply to the Note, 

such an argument must also fail. The contract in question is one 
- 13 - 

between Walker and HLS. Although members of the JOLT senior staff 

may have had discretion to respond with some flexibility to 

citation issues in student-authored work, no student could 

reasonably expect that the student editors could somehow have 

exempted Walker from being held to the HLS plagiarism policy once 

her work was before the Board. See Mangla v. Brown Univ., 135 

F.3d 80, 83 (1st Cir. 1998) (finding it reasonable for Brown to 

expect its students not to rely on oral statements by faculty or 

administrators as binding promises by the university when such 

statements ran contrary to its school catalog). 

IV. Conclusion

Walker has not presented facts a student could have 

relied upon to form a reasonable expectation that the plagiarism 

policy had the meaning she is asserting. The HLS plagiarism policy 

refers to "[a]ll work submitted," a phrase that on its face applies 

to any student work for any academic or nonacademic exercise, 

whether in draft or final form, turned in to an instructor or 

student editor of an extracurricular law journal. We affirm the 

district court's grant of summary judgment to Defendants on Count 

I. Walker's failure to prevail as to Count I undermines her 

arguments with respect to the defamation claims she made in Count 

IV. We, therefore, also affirm the district court's grant of 

summary judgment to Defendants on Count IV.