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Ethics

Suit is ‘almost a word-for-word carbon copy’ of prior complaint filed by different lawyers, federal judge says

By Debra Cassens Weiss

April 15, 2025, 8:53 am CDT

Updated: A federal judge in Puerto Rico has said she is considering sanctions for a San Juan, Puerto Rico, lawyer who filed a lawsuit that is “almost a word-for-word carbon copy” of a suit filed by different lawyers representing different plaintiffs.

In an April 9 order, U.S. District Judge Aida M. Delgado-Colon of the District of Puerto Rico found that the conduct by lawyer David Efron “runs afoul not only of attorney Efron’s duty of competence to his client but also his duty of candor to the court.”

Law 360 has the story.

Efron told the ABA Journal that there was no plagiarism because the plaintiffs in both cases are cooperating.

Efron is representing San Juan in a December 2023 suit alleging that activities by several oil-industry defendants caused damages because of their impact on climate change. Delgado-Colon said Efron’s suit and some of his other case filings are similar to documents in a prior suit filed by about 40 other municipalities.

“Just a review of the first couple of paragraphs of the complaint is enough to warrant suspicion,” Delgado-Colon wrote.

The opening language, footnotes and citations are identical to the corresponding paragraphs in the municipalities’ case, with a few exceptions, Delgado-Colon said. They include “sprinkling some adverbs such as ‘incredibly’ at the beginning of a paragraph,” referring to the correct plaintiff and “breaking a paragraph in two.”

As pointed out by the defendants, Efron’s suit was so “rife with examples of plagiarism” that it refers to documents that were never filed, it sometimes refers to the singular plaintiff as “municipalities,” and it repeats typos in the other suit, Delgado-Colon said in her order. Efron also refers to “this class action,” even though San Juan denied bringing such a case, the judge said.

“Attorney Efron lifted not only the entire theory of San Juan’s case from the municipalities’ case but went so far [as] to use virtually the very same words and ideas, usurping the thought processes and legal theories a client hires an attorney to develop and perform,” Delgado-Colon said.

Delgado-Colon said Efron was also late in filing case documents and ordered him to show cause why he should not be sanctioned $7,000 for “untimely filings and lack of diligence in the management of case deadlines.” Efron had said he was in a federal jury trial at the time.

As for the alleged plagiarism, the judge said a monetary sanction on its own would be “insufficient to address the seriousness of the circumstance,” and she would be issuing a separate order to address that issue.

“This opinion and order should serve as a cautionary tale for all members of the bar,” Delgado-Colon wrote.

Efron told the Journal in an email that the judge had “rushed to judgment” without getting the full story.

“There was no plagiarism,” Efron says. The plaintiffs in both cases “are collaborating for the same cause in the interest of controlling climate change. The judge without even conferring with counsel rushed to judgment without knowing that counsel in both cases are collaborating.”

Efron also says the order “is not final and has been referred for further proceedings after we are given an opportunity to respond and show cause.”

Updated April 15 at 11:23 a.m. to add lawyer David Efron’s comments.

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3. Former Thompson Hine partner won’t have…

Law Firms

Former Thompson Hine partner won’t have to arbitrate surviving sex bias claims, federal judge rules

By Debra Cassens Weiss

April 7, 2025, 9:28 am CDT

A federal judge in New York City has refused to dismiss several claims against Thompson Hine in a lawsuit brought by a fired income partner, who alleged that the law firm’s New York office was run “like a toxic boys club locker room.”

In a March 31 opinion, U.S. District Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr. on the Southern District of New York allowed lawyer Rebecca Brazzano’s claims for a hostile work environment, sexual harassment, sex discrimination, retaliation, and aiding and abetting violations of anti-discrimination laws. Some of the claims were brought under New York state law and New York City law, and some were brought under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

The tossed claims included defamation, abuse of process, retaliation based on a response to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and negligent infliction of emotional distress. As a result of the dismissals, Ohio partner Thomas Feher, accused of involvement in the EEOC response, is no longer a defendant.

Law360 and Law.com covered the decision.

Carter said the firm could not compel arbitration because the firm’s arbitration clause was invalidated under the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2021. The law applied because Brazzano was fired in April 2022, a month after the law took effect.

The suit had alleged that partner Richard De Palma perpetuated an “old boys’ network” and “horded” incoming work or sent it to male equity partners. He was the New York litigation vice chair at the time of the alleged events; he is now the chair of international arbitration, according to Law.com.

A Thompson Hine spokesperson commented in an email to Law.com.

“We are gratified that the court has agreed with us and taken the first step of dismissing many of Ms. Brazzano’s claims on their face,” the statement said. “We will continue the process of demonstrating, through evidence, that there is no basis for the remainder of Ms. Brazzano’s outlandish allegations, in whichever forum the courts ultimately determine is appropriate.”

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3. Suits seeking continued US funding will likely…

U.S. Supreme Court

Suits seeking continued US funding will likely be routed to Court of Federal Claims after SCOTUS decision, law prof says

By Debra Cassens Weiss

April 7, 2025, 11:42 am CDT

A decision on Friday by the U.S. Supreme Court in a challenge to an education-grant freeze will likely redirect many other lawsuits regarding Trump administration spending decisions to the Court of Federal Claims, according to a law professor.

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision allowed the Trump administration to freeze $65 million in education-related grants while a suit filed by eight states is litigated.

The Supreme Court found that the government was likely to succeed in its argument that a district court lacked jurisdiction to order the payment of money under the Administrative Procedure Act. The law waives government immunity but not for court orders to enforce a contractual obligation to pay money along the lines of the order by U.S. District Judge Myong J. Joun of the District of Massachusetts, the Supreme Court said.

Instead, the Court of Federal Claims has jurisdiction to hear such suits, the high court said.

Writing at the Volokh Conspiracy, Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston, said the ruling “should quickly knock out many other ‘spending’ cases and redirect them to the Court of Federal Claims. This is a court most people have never heard of but will soon become very important.”

The Supreme Court’s decision stayed a March 10 temporary restraining order issued by Joun, report Politico, Reuters, Howe on the Court, the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Chief Justice John Roberts dissented from the decision but did not issue or join a dissent. The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices also dissented.

The Trump administration had canceled the grants because they included diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. The states that sued are California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, New York and Wisconsin.

Joun’s order had required the government to pay past-due grant obligations and to continue paying the obligations as they accrue. The judge based the decision on a finding that the challengers were likely to succeed on their claim that the freeze was arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.

The Supreme Court disagreed with that finding.

Generally, TROs cannot be appealed, but the order issued by Joun was more akin to a preliminary injunction, the majority said.

In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the general rule is that Administrative Procedure Act suits go to federal district courts, even when a remedial order may result in the disbursement of funds.

“So the court’s reasoning is at the least underdeveloped, and very possibly wrong,” she said.

Kagan also criticized the majority for making a decision based on the government’s emergency application.

“The risk of error increases when this court decides cases—as here—with barebones briefing, no argument and scarce time for reflection,” she wrote.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a separate dissent, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

“It is beyond puzzling that a majority of justices conceive of the government’s application as an emergency,” Jackson wrote. “It is likewise baffling that anyone is persuaded that the equities favor the government when the government does not even argue that the lower courts erred in concluding that it likely behaved unlawfully.”

The decision is Department of Education v. California.

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3. Federal judge’s Columbia clerk boycott didn’t…

Judiciary

Federal judge’s Columbia clerk boycott didn’t harm public confidence in judiciary, judicial council rules

By Debra Cassens Weiss

April 10, 2025, 11:36 am CDT

A judge on the U.S. Court of International Trade did not violate ethics rules by refusing to hire law clerks who attended Columbia University, according to the judicial council of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Chicago.

In an April 8 decision, the council dismissed the complaint against Judge Stephen A. Vaden, one of 13 federal judges who participated in the boycott and explained why in a letter to the school.

Law360, Reuters and the Volokh Conspiracy have coverage.

President Donald Trump has nominated Vaden to be the deputy secretary of the Department of Agriculture, Reuters reports. A U.S. Senate panel had a hearing on his nomination Tuesday.

The judges had refused to hire law clerks who attended Columbia University or Columbia Law School because of the university’s handling of disruptions caused by pro-Palestinian protesters. Columbia has become “an incubator of bigotry,” the judges said in their letter to Columbia, and the judges have lost confidence in the institution.

Vaden’s boycott and his signature on the letter do not harm the integrity of the judicial office, do not harm public confidence in the judiciary, and do not cast doubt on his impartiality, the judicial council said.

“A judge may refuse to hire law clerks from a law school or university that has, in the judge’s view, failed to foster important aspects of higher education, like civility in discourse, respect for freedom of speech and viewpoint nondiscrimination,” the opinion said.

The chief judge of the U.S. Court of International Trade had transferred the ethics complaint against Vaden to the 7th Circuit’s judicial council for review. The person who filed the ethics complaint is in prison for his role in firebombing and vandalizing Jewish synagogues.

Vaden was represented by the First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit conservative legal organization, and Lisa Blatt of Williams & Connolly.

Judicial councils have also tossed ethics complaints against 11 of the other 12 boycotting judges, including, apparently, two federal appeals judges: Judge James C. Ho of the 5th Circuit at New Orleans and, according to Reuters, Judge Elizabeth L. Branch of the 11th Circuit at Atlanta.

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3. Art generated solely by AI can’t be copyrighted,…

Copyright Law

Art generated solely by AI can’t be copyrighted, federal appeals court says

By Debra Cassens Weiss

March 19, 2025, 11:05 am CDT

A federal appeals court has ruled against a computer scientist who sought to copyright a work of art made by his artificial intelligence system, the “Creativity Machine.”

Computer scientist Stephen Thaler is not entitled to copyright artwork made solely by AI, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled Tuesday.

Reuters and Courthouse News Service have coverage of the March 18 opinion.

“The Creativity Machine cannot be the recognized author of a copyrighted work because the Copyright Act of 1976 requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being,” the D.C. Circuit said in a decision by Judge Patricia Millett, an appointee of former President Barack Obama.

The holding makes is unnecessary to address the U.S. Copyright Office’s argument that the U.S. Constitution also requires human authorship of copyrighted material, Millett said. The appeals court also said Thaler had waived an argument that he could obtain a copyright because he made and used the Creativity Machine.

The D.C. Circuit said its decision does not prohibit a copyright when a work is authored by a human with the help of AI.

“The rule requires only that the author of that work be a human being—the person who created, operated or used artificial intelligence—and not the machine itself,” Millett said.

Millett acknowledged that the Copyright Office has rejected some copyright applications based on the human-authorship requirement, even when a human is listed as the author.

“Line-drawing disagreements” over how much that AI contributed to a work aren’t issue in Thaler’s case, however, because he listed the Creativity Machine as the sole author, the appeals court said.

Thaler plans to appeal the decision, his attorney, Ryan Abbott, told Reuters.

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3. Meet the federal judge labeled ‘radical left…

Judiciary

Meet the federal judge labeled ‘radical left lunatic’ by Trump, derided by DOJ for ‘micromanaged’ request

By Debra Cassens Weiss

March 20, 2025, 8:50 am CDT

A federal judge facing President Donald Trump’s ire because of his rulings on deportation authority was once a housemate with Brett Kavanaugh, a future U.S. Supreme Court justice, at Yale Law School.

Chief U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg, 62, of the District of Columbia “has a history of bipartisan support,” the Washington Post reports, having been nominated to the District of Columbia Superior Court by a Republican president and to the federal court in Washington, D.C., by a Democratic president.

He also appears for speaking engagements at Yale with U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich of the District of Columbia, a Trump appointee, where they emphasize a commitment to rule of law, according to NPR.

But Boasberg is being targeted by Trump, who wrote on social media that the judge is a “radical left lunatic of a judge, a troublemaker and agitator” who should be impeached.

Boasberg is overseeing a lawsuit challenging Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members. Boasberg ordered the administration not to use the law for deportations and told Department of Justice lawyers Saturday that planes carrying the deportees should be turned around.

Three planes carrying 238 immigrants reached their destination in El Salvador in Central America, the New York Times reports. Boasberg gave the administration a Wednesday deadline to provide details on the flights, which was met with a government request for a stay that said the judge’s quest for information was a “micromanaged and unnecessary judicial fishing expedition,” NBC News reports.

“Continuing to beat a dead horse solely for the sake of prying from the government legally immaterial facts and wholly within a sphere of core functions of the executive branch is both purposeless and frustrating to the consideration of the actual legal issues at stake in this case,” the DOJ said.

In a March 19 order, Boasberg agreed to provide the government an extra day to decide whether to invoke the state secrets privilege, “although their grounds for such request at first blush are not persuasive.” Rather than engaging in a fishing expedition, he said, he was seeking information “to determine if the government deliberately flouted” his orders.

Boasberg grew up in Washington, D.C., where his father worked for former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, according to the New York Times.

He attended Yale as an undergraduate, where he played basketball and also obtained a master’s degree in history from the University of Oxford. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1990.

After graduation, Boasberg worked as a law clerk for a federal appeals judge, as an associate at two law firms, and as a homicide prosecutor at the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C. He was appointed to the District of Columbia Superior Court in 2002 by former President George W. Bush and to the federal bench in 2011 by former President Barack Obama. He also served a seven-year term on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

On the bench, Boasberg “is something of a stickler for footnote brevity,” according to a prior ABA Journal story. He has tossed briefs in several suits for violating a local court ruling banning excessive footnotes.

He is also known “for his booming baritone voice and for peppering legal opinions with colorful language and pop culture references,” according to Reuters. In one opinion, Boasberg “cited a Star Trek reference to the Borg catchphrase ‘Resistance is futile,’” the article reports.

He has also been involved in other cases involving issues of importance to Trump.

“In his 14 years on the federal bench,” the Associated Press reports, Boasberg “has resolved secret grand jury disputes that arose during the special counsel investigations into Trump, oversaw improvements after the Trump-Russia investigation in how the Justice Department conducts national security surveillance, and handled his share of sentencings for rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”

One of the rioters called Boasberg a “clown” and a “fraud” during a court hearing. Boasberg “calmly listened,” according to the AP.

The deportation suit is J.G.G. v. Trump.

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3. Federal judge who sought female attorneys…

Judiciary

Federal judge who sought female attorneys among class counsel has acknowledged sex-bias concerns, order says

By Debra Cassens Weiss

March 25, 2025, 9:21 am CDT

A federal judge who called for female attorneys to be “adequately represented” on the leadership team for plaintiffs in multidistrict contraceptive litigation has “acknowledged the concerns created by her statements,” according to an order closing an ethics inquiry.

U.S. District Judge M. Casey Rodgers of the Northern District of Florida “has taken appropriate voluntary corrective action that acknowledges and remedies the problems created by her statements,” wrote Chief Judge William H. Pryor Jr. of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Atlanta in the March 20 order.

Conservative activist Mike Davis, the founder of the Article III Project—a conservative group—filed a complaint against Rodgers after she said during a Feb. 21 case management conference and in a Feb. 23 order that she thinks that female attorneys have to be “adequately represented” on the leadership team given the female plaintiffs in the contraceptive drug Depo-Provera litigation.

Davis had released the complaint and his organization, the Article III Project, published online articles about it. He alleged that Rodgers’ statements amounted to discrimination based on sex and constituted judicial misconduct.

Rodgers omitted references to sex when she invited applications for leadership positions in a Feb. 28 order. All applicants would be considered based on merit, she said in the order. Then, in a March 13 hearing allowing nearly 70 applicants to give presentations, Rodgers said she would not give preferences to women to avoid the appearance of impermissible sex discrimination.

Pryor said Rodgers’ voluntary corrective action was sufficient while warning that judges can’t discriminate based on sex when selecting class counsel.

Pryor noted a 2013 statement by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in a cert denial in which he criticized a judge’s “unique” requirement that class counsel fairly reflect the composition of plaintiffs.

What Alito described as a unique practice “has been touted as a ‘best practice’ in multidistrict litigation,” Pryor said. “Commentators openly encourage judges who preside over these actions to consider impermissible characteristics like sex or race when they appoint leadership counsel.”

Notions about a lawyer’s ability to fairly and adequately represent class interests “must exist within the bounds of the rules that govern judicial conduct, and those bounds prohibit discrimination based on sex,” Pryor said.

Law360 and Reuters are among the publications with coverage of the order, noted by How Appealing.

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