Cracks in an Institution

Plagiarism still plagues the Supreme Court, as the latest chapter in the Japanese comfort women case reveals. Far, far away from the main resolution in the Vinuya case, two Justices confront each other in separate opinions, with one accusing the other of “breach” of her own standards.

Here’s what Justice Roberto Abad says about Justice Meilou Sereno: “Justice Sereno has no right to preach at the expense of the majority about educative and moral directional value” in writing published articles.For one thing, her standards are obviously for work done in the academe, not for the judge plodding at his desk to perform government work.For another, I note that on occasions she has breached those very standards, lifting from works of others without proper attribution.”

Then, Justice Abad launches into an examination of previous published articles of Sereno, and identifies certain points which, for him, constitute those breaches.(I wonder how many hours Justice Abad had to devote to rigorously fillet Sereno’s old works.)

In conclusion, he says this: “I can concede that Justice Sereno may not have intended to plagiarize the work of others even if she copied verbatim from them without proper attribution or quotation marks.Her above articles were, taken as whole, essentially hers.I regret, however, that since she wrote them as an academician bound by the high standards that she and the University of the Philippines where she taught espouse, she may have failed, borrowing her own phrase, to set the correct “educative and moral directional value for the young.”

Justice Sereno doesn’t take this sitting down, as she writes a rebuttal of these accusations in her own dissenting opinion. She does this point by point, even thanking Justice Abad for bringing to her attention that the ADB report published in 2005 that she was supposed to have copied in 2007, had in fact been based on her own 2001 paper.So in fact, it was the 2005 report that failed to credit her original work.

While Justice Abad says Sereno probably did not intend to plagiarize (in which case, under the rubric of the main Vinuya decision where the Supreme Court lays down the rule that it is first necessary for intent to accompany a conclusion of plagiarism, and no intent therefore leads to no foul), Justice Sereno comes right out and says she didn’t.

Aside from producing yet more matrices of her publications compared to the original works referred to by Abad, an exercise which will undoubtedly thrill would-be detectives, she further reveals in her opinion that she has written a letter to the UP School of Economics to ask them to examine whether her article in the Philippine Law Journal plagiarized from a book called the “Economic Analysis of Law” by Judge Richard Posner. (I was wondering why she chose the School of Economics, and then I realized since the topic was economics and it was all about this proposed economic model, that it made sense for the School to tackle the issue.)

So now we have in our judicial annals two Justices publicly discussing whether one is a plagiarist, when this issue was never raised by the litigants. It’s a pity, as it seems we now have more evidence of the intramurals that goes on within the cloisters of the Supreme Court.

This week already saw accusations from a litigant that Chief Justice Corona character-assassinated another Justice in the Chief’s chambers.Then, the official spokesperson of the Court was left to defend the Chief before media, when I would have thought his role in life was merely to represent the collective voice of the whole court, and not to field questions about whether or not sundry accusations versus one particular Justice were false.

But wait: There’s more to come.The resolution on the UP College of Law faculty, who are threatened with sanctions for being vocal about Justice del Castillo’s copying from the Yale Law Journal, is next up.(And by the way, there are yet more examples of copying cited by Justice Sereno in her latest Vinuya opinion.)With the jolly atmosphere so evident from this, the Vinuya decision, we’ll probably be treated to more insights on the workings of this venerable institution when that comes out.

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