RESOLUTION
PER
CURIAM:
[T]he
Court’s decision in the present case does not set aside [the different norms
assumed by educational institutions in treating plagiarism]. The decision makes this clear,
thus:
To paraphrase Bast and Samuels, while the academic publishing
model is based on the originality of the writer’s thesis, the judicial system is based on the
doctrine of stare decisis, which encourages courts to cite historical
legal data, precedents, and related studies in their decisions. The
judge is not expected to produce original scholarship in every
respect. The strength of a decision lies in the soundness and
general acceptance of the precedents and long held legal opinions it draws
from.
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There is a basic reason for individual
judges of whatever level of courts, including the Supreme Court, not to use
original or unique language when reinstating the laws involved in the cases
they decide. Their duty is to apply the laws as these are
written. But laws include, under the doctrine of stare
decisis, judicial interpretations of such laws as are applied to specific
situations. Under this doctrine, Courts are “to stand by precedent
and not to disturb settled point.” Once the Court has “laid down a principle of
law as applicable to a certain state of facts, it will adhere to that
principle, and apply it to all future cases, where facts are substantially the
same; regardless of whether the parties or property are the same.”
And because judicial precedents are not
always clearly delineated, they are quite often entangled in apparent
inconsistencies or even in contradictions, prompting experts in the law to
build up regarding such matters a large body of commentaries or annotations
that, in themselves, often become part of legal writings upon which lawyers and
judges draw materials for their theories or solutions in particular
cases. And, because
of the need to be precise and correct, judges and practitioners alike, by practice
and tradition, usually lift passages from such precedents and writings, at
times omitting, without malicious intent, attributions to the originators.
Is this
dishonest? No. Duncan Webb, writing for the International
Bar Association puts it succinctly. When practicing lawyers (which include judges) write
about the law, they effectively place their ideas, their language, and their
work in the public domain, to be affirmed, adopted, criticized, or
rejected. Being in the public domain, other lawyers can thus freely
use these without fear of committing some wrong or incurring some liability.
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If the Court were to inquire into the issue of
plagiarism respecting its past decisions from the time of Chief Justice
Cayetano S. Arellano to the present, it is likely to discover that it has not
on occasion acknowledged the originators of passages and views found in its
decisions. These omissions are true for many of the decisions that
have been penned and are being penned daily by magistrates from the Court of
Appeals, the Sandiganbayan, the Court of Tax Appeals, the Regional Trial Courts
nationwide and with them, the municipal trial courts and other first level
courts. Never in the judiciary’s more than 100 years of history has
the lack of attribution been regarded and demeaned as plagiarism.
This is not to say that the magistrates of our
courts are mere copycats. They are not. Their decisions
analyze the often conflicting facts of each case and sort out the relevant from
the irrelevant. They identify and formulate the issue or issues that
need to be resolved and evaluate each of the laws, rulings, principles, or
authorities that the parties to the case invoke. The decisions then
draw their apt conclusions regarding whether or not such laws, rulings,
principles, or authorities apply to the particular cases before the
Court. These efforts, reduced in writing, are the product of the
judges’ creativity. It is here—actually the substance of their decisions—that their genius,
originality, and honest labor can be found, of which they should be proud.
In Vinuya, Justice
Del Castillo examined and summarized the facts as seen by the opposing sides in
a way that no one has ever done. He identified and formulated the
core of the issues that the parties raised. And when he had done
this, he discussed the state of the law relevant to their
resolution. It was here that he drew materials from various sources,
including the three foreign authors cited in the charges against
him. He compared the divergent views these present as they developed
in history. He then explained why the Court must reject some views
in light of the peculiar facts of the case and applied those that suit such
facts. Finally, he drew from his discussions of the facts and the law the right
solution to the dispute in the case. On the whole, his work was original. He had
but done an honest work.
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True, Justice Del Castillo failed
to attribute to the foreign authors materials that he lifted from their works
and used in writing the decision for the Court in the Vinuya case. But,
as the Court said, the evidence as found by its Ethics Committee shows that the attribution to these authors
appeared in the beginning drafts of the decision. Unfortunately,
as testified to by a highly qualified and experienced court-employed
researcher, she
accidentally deleted the same at the time she was cleaning up the final
draft. The Court believed her since, among other reasons, she had no
motive for omitting the attribution. The foreign authors
concerned, like the dozens of other sources she cited in her research, had high
reputations in international law.
Notably, those foreign authors
expressly attributed the controversial passages found in their works to earlier
writings by others. The authors concerned were not themselves the
originators. As it happened, although the ponencia of Justice Del
Castillo accidentally deleted the attribution to them, there remained in the
final draft of the decision attributions of the same passages to the earlier
writings from which those authors borrowed their ideas in the first place. In
short, with the remaining
attributions after the erroneous clean-up, the passages as it finally appeared
in the Vinuya decision still showed on their face that the
lifted ideas did not belong to Justice Del Castillo but to
others. He did not pass them off as his own.
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ACCORDINGLY, the Court DENIES petitioners’
motion for reconsideration for lack of merit.
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