A federal judge in Puerto Rico issued a scathing order last week accusing Democratic prosecutors on the island of plagiarizing nearly their entire 241-page complaint that blamed oil companies for causing global warming.
In the order Wednesday, district court judge Aida Delgado-Colon outlined how David Efron, the lead attorney representing Puerto Rico’s capital city San Juan, appears to have plagiarized a similar but separate complaint that 16 Puerto Rican municipalities filed a year earlier. A side-by-side comparison of the two complaints shows large blocks of text are copied word-for-word.
Delgado-Colon wrote that the situation should serve as a cautionary tale for all members of the bar, characterizing San Juan’s complaint and subsequent briefs as “copycat filings” and stating that the case presents an “astonishing example of plagiarism in the legal profession.” She added that a monetary sanction charging Efron would be insufficient to address the seriousness of the circumstances and said a separate order is needed to properly address it.
“Attorney Efron’s plagiarism constitutes attorney misconduct and an ethical violation,” she wrote. “The touchstone of plagiarism is lack of attribution. As in law school, passing someone else’s work off as one’s own is wrong as a matter of fact and professional ethics.”
“Taking another attorney’s work product without attribution, adopting it wholesale as the foundation of your client’s case, and subsequently submitting plagiarized briefs certainly would throw any attorney’s Rule 11(b) certification into serious doubt,” Delgado-Colon continued. Rule 11(b) states that, by submitting any filing in federal court, an attorney certifies the filing is truthful and presented in good faith.
The order is an embarrassing blow to plaintiffs representing San Juan, and threatens to discredit and upend their case altogether, depending on how Delgado-Colon rules on the matter. And it is the latest blow to plaintiffs representing both San Juan and jurisdictions across the country.
San Juan’s government initially filed its complaint in December 2023, blaming the oil industry—including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, and the American Petroleum Institute—for climate change and demanding defendants pay tens of millions of dollars in damages related to the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season.
Democratic prosecutors in nine states, more than a dozen cities and counties, and Washington, D.C., which altogether are home to more than 25 percent of Americans, have filed similar cases against oil companies in recent years—a largely coordinated effort that is designed to punish the industry and lay the groundwork for an economy-wide green energy transition.
Oil companies have argued that federal law alone, not local and state claims, can be used to regulate nationwide emissions. Judges in New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and New York have agreed, dismissing the cases altogether and noting that the cases involve interstate and international emissions beyond the scope of local law.
“Too often, left-wing trial lawyers aren’t being hired by public officials for their legal talent, but for their political or money connections,” O.H. Skinner, the executive director of Alliance for Consumers and former Arizona solicitor general, told the Washington Free Beacon.
“These cases are part of a centrally hubbed effort, backed by dark money donors, with public officials merely serving as lunchpail carriers for behind-the-scenes actors,” he continued. “Orders like this help highlight how poorly thought through these cases are, how untethered their legal arguments are, and how comfortable judges should be in tossing them on the ash heap.”
Efron and the city of San Juan did not respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Judge Delgado-Colon’s order last week isn’t the first plagiarism allegation to arise during the wave of climate cases. In 2020, an industry-backed blog noted that Washington, D.C.’s complaint against ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and Shell included background paragraphs that were nearly verbatim copies of paragraphs in Minnesota’s complaint against those same companies.
And in an unrelated blunder, prosecutors in Rhode Island accused oil industry defendants of extracting, refining, and manufacturing a substantial portion of their fossil fuel products in Rhode Island. In reality, according to the Energy Information Administration, the state does not have any crude oil or natural gas reserves and does not have a single petroleum refinery, instead importing all of its fossil fuels.
That misstatement is another Rule 11 violation, defendants argued in a brief submitted in February. Chevron lawyers wrote that the court should dismiss the complaint, sanction the state for misconduct under Rule 11, and award fees and costs to defendants. A hearing on that motion occurred Tuesday.
“Lawyers have a duty to conduct a good faith investigation into the merits and allegations before filing a complaint,” Donald Kochan, a law professor at and executive director of the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, told the Free Beacon. “And they have a continuing obligation to amend a complaint when factual errors in it are brought to their attention.”
“Here, careful lawyers should’ve known better before filing as even official state records explain that oil is neither manufactured, refined, or extracted in Rhode Island,” Kochan added. “It is inexplicable that Rhode Island’s attorneys chose not to amend their complaint and instead relied on advancing factually inaccurate and erroneous claims; this episode is a disservice to Rhode Island’s residents who should expect their elected officials and their agents to represent them honestly and professionally.”
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
