In what is said to be an unprecedented move, the Delhi High Court bench has apologised and deleted several paragraphs from one of its judgments which a law intern had copied from a foreign journal without acknowledgment, The Times of India reported. 

The TOI report states, "Taking a serious view of plagiarism, a division bench of Justices Pradeep Nandrajog and Mukta Gupta on Tuesday suo moto recalled the November 27 order and struck off paras 4-37 from the 106-page judgment on a patent dispute between Indian drug firm Cipla and multinational giant Hoffman La Roche."

The bench however said that the conclusion of the judgment remains unchanged because the copied paragraphs, which have now been deleted, were only a summary of the facts. 

The bench further said that the single judge order was lengthy and so it "decided to briefly pen profile it 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 TOI report adds that after the bench realised that an article in Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property had also profiled the single-judge verdict, it "dawned on the bench that paragraphs 4 to 37 of our judgment were a virtual verbatim copy of the article published. This has constrained the bench to pass a suo moto order offering our apology to the learned authors of the article and simultaneously taking corrective action."