• Mexico nominates Norma Pina as the first female president of the Supreme Court.
• She succeeds Arturo Zaldivar after a heated dispute over who should lead the court.
• Accusations of plagiarism against a rival justice marred the succession process.

On Monday, the Supreme Court of Mexico elected its first female president, who has pushed back against the government’s nationalist energy programme, in the midst of a succession process marred by accusations of plagiarism against a rival justice.

By a majority vote of 6 to 5, the judges selected Norma Pina to lead Mexico’s highest court, replacing a member chosen by the previous administration.

Pina has backed Mexico’s shift to renewable energy, opposing portions of a controversial electricity law championed by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador that favour the country’s state-owned, fossil-fuel-reliant energy businesses.

She succeeds Arturo Zaldivar after a heated dispute over who should lead the court, sparked by a December media article suggesting that another candidate, Justice Yasmin Esquivel, plagiarised her undergraduate thesis.

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Esquivel angrily disputed the accusation, which prompted her alma university, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, to investigate (UNAM).

Lopez Obrador, who nominated Esquivel to serve on the 11-member court in 2019, criticised the plagiarism accusation published by the media site Latinus as an attempt to discredit the government and what he refers to as his reform of Mexico.

The president exerted pressure on the court to support his policies, including his push to relinquish control of the energy industry to the national power utility Comision Nacional de Electricidad (CFE) and the state oil company Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex).

Previous governments, especially the administration led by Enrique Pena Nieto, skewed the energy market in favour of private firms, according to Lopez Obrador.

His electricity bill reached the Supreme Court, where Pina voted against elements of the law, including one that granted CFE precedence in connecting power plants to the grid, citing Mexico’s constitutional commitment to reduce its carbon imprint.

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