A justice on Mexico’s Supreme Court is facing a plagiarism scandal threatening to upend her effort to become the body’s president.
The week before Christmas, a bombshell accusation was made against Justice Yasmin Esquivel: that her 1987 law school thesis was essentially a carbon copy of a 1986 thesis. Screenshots from the original article show lengthy, identical portions of both. The library at Mexico’s National Autonomous University later confirmed that there was a “high level of coincidence” between both works, and a larger university investigation is underway.
Esquivel has denied the allegations, and released a statement Dec. 25 claiming that she had begun working on her thesis in 1985, that it was in fact her work, that may have been stolen and that the accusations are an attempt to derail her candidacy for the Supreme Court presidency. The court is scheduled to meet Jan. 2 to pick its next head.
