Plagiarism Accusations Threaten to Upend Democrats’ Climate Lawsuit Against Oil Companies
16th April 2025
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.