Plagiarism Debases Court's Stature

In writing decisions, the Supreme Court is building up a body of legal literature that will be read, analyzed, quoted, and referred to not just by lawyers in their pleadings, but by academic researchers as well. Their articles will end up in law journals or journals of other academic disciplines with the ever growing need for interdisciplinary studies.

To add the element of intent for judicial plagiarism to be considered wrong and reprehensible is like adding water to wine. It changes the very essence of the proscribed act. It adulterates the process of engendering knowledge.

Rather than strengthening the safeguards to prevent the act from being committed, the Court loosens the rigor of scholarly judicial writing that can lead to undisciplined cut-and-paste behavior among its fold.

A copied sentence or paragraph in a Supreme Court decision might find itself quoted in an academic article and can be attributed to the Court, when, in fact, it is not the Court's language but someone else's whose work was not properly cited in the Court decision.

If the Court will insist on differentiating plagiarism in the judiciary from that in the academe, its decisions will be relegated to just mere adjudication of rights of the parties involved and will cease as a source of scholarly research that can define norms.

Creating a different norm for dealing with plagiarism in the courts waters down the value of court decisions as a reliable repository of scholarly discussions of or disquisitions on matters brought before the magistrates.

Justices who are supposed to be at the helm of legal philosophy are reduced to mere adjudicators of legal rights between opposing parties and not the legal scholars they ought to be.

It is this that will debase the Court's stature, not the call for justices to rectify an error or for them to resign their posts.