A rather remarkable development in the Indian legal space! In the first ever pharmaceutical patent trial case in India (Roche vs Cipla), judges accept the charge of plagiarism (they had copied parts of their initial summation of the lower court order). And then go on to apologise to the authors of the piece (from which their intern had liberally borrowed). Lastly, they expunge the “copied” paragraphs from their judgment.
Hats off to Justice Nadrajog and Justice Gupta of the Delhi High Court for this rare corrective action and courage. And I say this, given the ease with which our public functionaries copy without attribution, and make no amends even when called out!
The order can be found in this link here. For background, you can see Swaraj’s post here. Here are excerpts from the order that issued today:
“Since the impugned judgment passed by the learned Single Judge was lengthy, the Bench had decided to briefly pen profile the impugned judgment and for which a law intern associated with the Bench offered to make a precise of the impugned judgment, and so well was the draft of the precise submitted that the Bench decided to incorporate the same in the judgment as was submitted to us by the intern.
The attention of the Bench was thereafter drawn to an Article published in the year 2013 where the impugned judgment had been pen profiled and it dawned on the Bench that paragraphs 4 to 38 of our judgment were a virtual verbatim copy of the Article published.
This has constrained the Bench to pass a suo moto order offering apology to the learned authors of the Article and simultaneously taking corrective action.”
Thomas will come back with a more detailed analysis on this soon.
ps: image from here
Corrective action courage or face saving?