Why Judicial Plagiarism Is Not The Real Scandal In Hong Kong Courts

The media outrage machine loves an easy villain. When news broke that Hong Kong High Court Judge Wilson Chan received a second reprimand for judicial plagiarism, the headline-writers went into full moral panic mode. The standard narrative was instantly assembled: a lazy judge copy-pasting judgment submissions, a system in decay, and a desperate need for ethics training.

That consensus is lazy, superficial, and entirely misses the structural crisis crushing legal systems worldwide.

If you think judicial copy-pasting is simply a story about personal moral failure, you do not understand how modern courts actually function. The real scandal is not that a judge reused counsel's written submissions. The real scandal is an archaic legal architecture that incentivizes boilerplate mechanics over rigorous judicial reasoning, hiding systemic overload behind the illusion of bespoke craftsmanship.

The Lazy Consensus Meets Legal Reality

Let us clear up the terminology that mainstream legal commentators conflate. Plagiarism in academia is a moral crime of intellectual theft. You steal someone else's original idea to claim unearned prestige.

In civil litigation, the legal framework is completely different.

When opposing legal teams submit written arguments to a judge, those documents are not private academic papers. They are formal petitions designed specifically for the judge to adopt. When a judge adopts large tracts of a winning party’s submissions, they are not "stealing" legal property—they are signaling that the party’s legal team accurately articulated the facts and the applicable law.

I have spent decades watching courtroom mechanics from the inside. Judges throughout common law jurisdictions—from London to Sydney to Hong Kong—frequently adopt party submissions. It happens daily. The distinction between acceptable judicial efficiency and problematic copy-pasting is not the act of copying itself; it is whether the judge independently exercised their judicial mind to assess the arguments before doing so.

When Chief Justice Andrew Cheung issued a solemn reprimand to Justice Chan, the outrage focused on the copy-paste act. Yet focusing entirely on the judicial cut-and-paste misses the root cause: court dockets are drowning, and the system values speed and throughput above genuine legal analysis.

The Myth Of The Bespoke Judgment

The public holds a romanticized, almost cinematic view of judicial work. They imagine a high court judge sitting in a oak-paneled library, painstakingly crafting every sentence of a 100-page decision from scratch, weighing philosophical nuances with a feather quill.

It is a fantasy.

Modern high court judges face staggering caseloads. They are flooded with hundreds of pages of skeleton arguments, expert witness reports, and statutory authority for every single commercial dispute. Expecting judges to draft entirely original prose for every procedural ruling or standard civil decision is not just unrealistic—it is a recipe for complete judicial gridlock.

Consider the operational burden:

• Document Volatility: A standard commercial case can easily generate over 5,000 pages of discovery and evidence.
• Time Constraints: Judges often have days, sometimes hours, to digest complex filings and issue orders to prevent commercial chaos.
• Systemic Bottlenecks: Appeals build up rapidly when written judgments are delayed, freezing assets and leaving businesses in limbo.

When faced with this avalanche, judges do what any overburdened knowledge worker does: they look for shortcuts. When a senior counsel delivers a impeccably structured summary of the law, the temptation to adopt that text verbatim is overwhelming.

The mistake isn't using the material. The mistake is doing so uncritically, without demonstrating that the judicial brain was actually engaged in evaluating the loser's case.

Why The "Ethics Training" Fix Is Complete Nonsense

Whenever a judicial scandal breaks, legal academics and bar associations immediately call for the same tired remedies: ethics seminars, judicial guidance notes, and stricter oversight committees.

These solutions are entirely performative. They treat a structural resource collapse as a personal discipline problem.

If you give a judge 50 complex cases a month and demand written judgments for all of them, no amount of ethics training will stop them from taking shortcuts. They will simply get better at hiding it. They will run text through paraphrasing tools, tweak sentence structures, and swap vocabulary to avoid literal text-matching software while changing zero percent of the underlying thought process.

That is actually worse. It replaces transparent copying with masked copying, wasting even more judicial hours on artificial rewrite jobs just to satisfy public relations concerns.

What Actually Needs To Change

If legal establishments truly want to prevent intellectual laziness on the bench, they must stop pretending the current operating model is sustainable. We need to dismantle the traditional judgment production line entirely.

1. Mandatory Separation of Facts and Findings

Courts should explicitly permit judges to adopt agreed-upon factual summaries provided by counsel, clearly marked as such. The judge's own written work should be strictly confined to the disputed legal analysis and the core decision logic. Stop requiring judges to retype factual backgrounds that neither party disputes.

2. Abbreviated Bench Rulings

The common law tradition's obsession with exhaustive, novel-length written judgments for routine matters is an expensive luxury. Summary judgments and standard civil appeals should default to short-form bench decisions with minimal written exposition unless a novel point of law is established.

3. Transparent Judicial AI Integration

Instead of pretending judges do not use digital assistance, courts must establish clear, auditable protocols for how research tools and text summaries are utilized in judgment drafting. Hiding tech usage behind administrative secrecy only guarantees sloppy implementation.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Judicial Oversight

There is a genuine downside to demanding total transparency and stripping away the illusion of bespoke judicial writing.

Public confidence in the rule of law relies heavily on prestige and formality. When you pull back the curtain and show that a multi-million-dollar legal dispute was settled by a judge adopting 90% of a law firm's pre-packaged argument, the legal profession loses some of its mystique. Litigants who lose will immediately claim they were cheated by a mechanical, unthinking process—even if the decision was legally sound.

That is the trade-off. We can either maintain the comforting theater of the heroic, solitary judge writing masterworks in isolation while court backlogs double every five years, or we can embrace a streamlined, transparently mechanical process that actually delivers timely justice.

The reprimand of Wilson Chan was an easy judicial PR victory. It allowed the legal hierarchy to point at a bad actor, issue a stern public slap on the wrist, and reassure the public that the system works.

It doesn't. The system is broken by design, and until we stop mistaking structural inefficiency for judicial tradition, the copy-paste tribunal will keep right on running.