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Courts on AI / Fabricated or misquoted citations

In re Marriage of Rodrigues and Craig

Court of Appeal of the State of California, Sixth Appellate District · State appellate courts · CA · · 2026 WL 1102361 · No. H051992; H052487; H052559 · opinion

Fabricated or misquoted citationscourt does not name AI

The California Court of Appeal, Sixth District on 2026-04-22 affirmed the status-only judgment and postjudgment orders and ordered the parties to bear their own appellate costs in In re the Marriage of Joanne Rodrigues and Nathan Craig. The self-represented appellant filed a brief with nine fabricated case citations.

Disposition
The three family-law appeals were affirmed and the parties were ordered to bear their own appellate costs.
Recorded conduct
Rodrigues’s pro se appellate brief supplied nine fictitious citations: In re Marriage of Brewster, Dorn, Freeman, Gowan, Mele, Olson, Rivera, Spector, and Moore v. California State Bd. of Equalization. — outcome: noted, no consequence; actor: litigant in person
Canonical record
Incident tracker entry — verified outcome, regulator disposition and related rules

What the court wrote

Verbatim from the court's document (public domain). Ellipses mark omitted text; nothing is paraphrased.

) Appellant's brief does not engage with the applicable standards of review. It contains little if any legal argument or citations to relevant authority. Instead, the brief cites authorities that do not support the propositions for which they are cited; decisions that have been disapproved by the Supreme Court; 10 and numerous nonexistent cases. 11 Extensive reliance on nonexistent legal authority could alone justify dismissing an appeal as “frivolous because it ‘rests on negligible legal foundation’ [Citations] and is peppered with fabricatedlegalcitations[,]... [andalso]unreasonablyviolates the Rules of Court because it does not support each point with citationstoreal(asopposedtofabricated)legalauthority. (See rule8. 204(a)(1)(B). )”(Nolandv. LandoftheFree,L. P.

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