Plagiarism Accusations Threaten To Upend Democrats’ Climate Lawsuit Against Oil Companies
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.
