Courts on AI / Fabricated or misquoted citations

In re Nicholia Cherry-Crockette

United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey · Federal bankruptcy courts · NJ · 2026-05-20 · No. 25-21600 · order

Fabricated or misquoted citations

On 2026-05-20, in In re Nicholia Cherry-Crockette, the District of New Jersey Bankruptcy Court denied the sanctions motion and rejected authorities that were nonexistent or did not support the debtor's position. A self-represented litigant filed a motion using nonexistent or hallucinated authorities and authorities used for propositions they did not support.

Disposition: The bankruptcy court denied the requested sanctions while addressing the AI-generated phantom authority issue.
Recorded conduct: The self-represented debtor relied on nonexistent or unsupported legal authority, including a phantom case the court described as generated by AI. The court denied the sanctions request in this document. — 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.

...tween debtors and creditors outside of the bankruptcy case. Here, the Debtor cites the case of In re Diamond, 346 B.R. 51 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y. 2006). That citation is incorrect, and the Court was unable to find the case using the name, date, or any other identifying information, leading the Court to conclude that this is likely a phantom case generated by AI. Another nonexistent citation by the Debtor is to In re Lisenby, 374 B.R. 271 (Bankr. M.D. Ala. 2007). Upon further research, the Court found a similar case: In re Lisenby, 2006 WL 802392 (Bankr. M.D. Ala. Feb. 22, 2006), which involved a request for default judgment on a willful violation of the automatic stay and a violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. Assuming that was the case the Debtor intended to cite, it is still unhelpful because that case did not, as the Debtor suggests, hold...

Authorities cited in the passage: Sears Roebuck & Co. v. Epperson

Court document: damiencharlotin.com
Read: 2026-09-07 · court document read from a public copy; the court's own copy was not found online when checked (see notes)provisional
Found via: charlotin-hallucinations-db
Notes: Read from the copy held by Damien Charlotin's AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC BY 4.0) of the court-authored document Re-coded from the document 2026-09-08 (independent second read). Official copy not obtained 2026-09-08: not in the court's GovInfo feed for this docket (many district courts publish only some orders) (checked govinfo.gov (USCOURTS), CourtListener RECAP search).

United States court documents are public domain; the topic coding, disposition line and summary are SafeLegalAI's reading of the document for comparison, not a finding about any person named in it. This record summarises a public court document or official publication and reports what it says; SafeLegalAI makes no findings of its own. Individuals and organisations are named only as they appear in that public record. Anyone named may send a right of reply, correction or contextual update (for example an appeal, vacatur or later disposition) via /report; we add a dated note where appropriate. Reply or correct this record.

compiled by the SafeLegalAI editorial teammethodas of 2026-09-08v0.2.2coding CC BY 4.0JSON Hugging Face GitHub