11 Biggest Plagiarism Scandals of All Time

9. Martin Luther King Jr.

Year: 1955

It would seem that even Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t above stealing other people’s work. In his Ph.D. dissertation, titled A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, he “borrowed” heavily from another student, doing a similar research. The inquiry by the Boston University, launched in 1991, acknowledged this fact, but didn’t recommend stripping him of his title, which is a standard procedure in plagiarism cases, citing that the dissertation “makes an intelligent contribution to scholarship.”