Case Summary (A.M. No. 10-7-17-SC)
Judicial Citation Practices Under Stare Decisis
• The judicial function rests on stare decisis: judges routinely cite precedents, statutes, and authoritative commentary to apply established law, rather than produce wholly original scholarship.
• Judicial writings serve to decide disputes and ensure correctness and fairness, not to advance original research.
• Courts and practitioners may lift tested language from public-domain or common-property legal materials without fear of disciplinary or liability concerns, so long as there is no fraudulent intent.
Distinction Between Academic and Judicial Writing
• Academic publishing demands originality, rigorous attribution, and often punitive measures for any unattributed copying.
• Judicial writing prioritizes accuracy and fidelity to law but relieves judges from being treated as literary authors; the emphasis is on correctness of legal outcome, not literary novelty.
• Judges are ethically bound to avoid misrepresentation of sources but may rely on publicly available legal commentary and previous court language without strict academic attribution standards.
Judges’ Exemption from Plagiarism Claims
• Leading authorities, such as the International Bar Association and Joyce C. George’s Judicial Opinion Writing Handbook, recognize that judges deciding cases are generally exempt from plagiarism claims, since their purpose is adjudication, not literary creation.
• The public domain status of judicial decisions and the risk-averse need for precise legal language further justify the practice of adopting established formulations.
Committee Findings on Drafting and Attribution
• The Ethics Committee found that initial drafts of the Vinuya decision included proper attributions to all sources.
• Court-employed researchers accidentally omitted three foreign-author citations while cleaning up the final draft—without any motive to deceive.
• Remaining citations to earlier source materials demonstrated that Del Castillo never presented others’ work as his own.
Application to Vinuya and Ang Ladlad Decisions
• In Vinuya v. Executive Secretary, Del Castillo’s ponencia engaged in detailed factual narration, issue-formulation, discussion of law, and systematic application to reach a fair outcome.
• The committee and en banc found no twisting of source materials or passing off of ideas.
• Similar allegations in Ang Ladlad v. Commission on Elections were examined and found equally without merit, as proper attributions existed despite formatting irregularities.
Dismissal of Reconsideration Motions
• Petitioners’ motion for reconsideration re-urged allegations of plagiarism, citation twisting, and gross neglect.
• The Court reaffirmed that no malicious or dishonest intent existed in Del Castillo’s work.
• The court dismissed both the original charges and the motions for reconsideration for lack of merit, preserving established practice that judicial decisions will not be annulled for inadvertent citation lapses.
Carpio Dissent: Jurisdiction and Copyright
• Justice Carpio argued that only Congress, by impeachment, may discipline Supreme Court justices for impeachable offenses, including betrayal of public trust.
• He maintained that the Court lacks jurisdiction to decide administrative complaints against its own members and should recall the Octobe
Case Syllabus (A.M. No. 10-7-17-SC)
Background
- Petitioners were members of the Malaya Lolas Organization who filed charges of plagiarism, twisting of cited materials, and gross neglect against Associate Justice Mariano C. del Castillo.
- The charges arose from Justice Del Castillo’s ponencia in G.R. No. 162230 (Vinuya v. Romulo), promulgated April 28, 2010.
- Petitioners’ principal claim was that the Supreme Court’s October 12, 2010 decision dismissing their complaint amounted to legalizing plagiarism in the Philippines.
Petitioners’ Allegations
- Plagiarism: “stealing and passing off as one’s own” ideas or words of another, requiring intent to deceive.
- Twisting of Cited Materials: alleged mischaracterization of original foreign authors’ views to support the Vinuya decision.
- Gross Neglect: failure to attribute dozens of lifted passages from three foreign authors and other sources.
Majority Resolution
- The Court, sitting en banc, defined plagiarism by reference to dictionary definitions and Black’s Law Dictionary: deliberate, knowing presentation of another’s work as one’s own.
- It held that accidental deletion of citations, without malice or intent to claim credit, does not constitute plagiarism.
- Distinction drawn between academic writing (where intent need not be shown) and judicial writing (where intent is essential to plagiarism).
- Emphasized doctrine of stare decisis: judicial decisions rely on accepted precedents, not original scholarship.
- Dismissed petitioners’ motion for reconsideration for lack of merit and denied further motions for intervention.
Definitions and Distinctions
- Plagiarism (common): “to steal and pass off as one’s own” ideas or words of another; requires deliberation and ill intent.
- Academic vs. Judicial Writing:
• Academia values originality and punishes objective copying regardless of intent.
• Judiciary values justice over originality; judges regularly use, and may omit strict attribution of, public-domain or precedent language without malice.
Rationale of the Majority
- Judges issue decisions to resolve real disputes, not to earn academic merit.
- Under stare decisis, judges frequently quote or paraphrase precedent without fresh attribution; this practice is tolerated absent bad faith.
- Judges derive creativity in fact-finding, issue formulation, legal analysis, and appli