Coverage

What Citation Safe checks, and what it doesn’t

If a citation comes back NOT FOUND, this page is what that verdict is pointing you to. NOT FOUND means we did not find the citation in the sources we checked as of that moment — it does not mean the citation is fabricated. A fabricated citation and a real citation sitting in a coverage gap produce the identical NOT FOUND result. This page exists so you can tell the difference before you decide which one you’re looking at.

What we check (Layer 1 — existence)

Case-law citations are checked against CourtListener’s database of published opinions (the Free Law Project), the same engine our legal-vertical adapter calls directly — not a third-party summary of it. A citation is looked up by reporter, volume, and page; where the citation type supports it, we additionally cross-check that the case name you claimed matches the case CourtListener actually has at that citation slot, so a real reporter slot occupied by a different case does not read as VERIFIED.

Reporter formats we currently parse

Our citation parser recognizes a fixed, published list of reporter abbreviations (lib/reporters.ts). As of this page’s last edit, that list is:

Federal: U.S., S. Ct., L. Ed. / L. Ed. 2d, F., F.2d, F.3d, F.4th, F. Supp. / F. Supp. 2d / F. Supp. 3d, Fed. Cl., B.R.
Regional (state cases reported in the regional reporter series): P., P.2d, P.3d · A., A.2d, A.3d · N.E., N.E.2d, N.E.3d · N.W., N.W.2d · S.E., S.E.2d · S.W., S.W.2d, S.W.3d · So., So. 2d, So. 3d.
Unpublished / electronic: Westlaw (WL) citations, and U.S. Dist. LEXIS / U.S. App. LEXIS citations specifically (kept as separate entries because CourtListener’s citation-redirect only resolves those exact slugs, not a generic “Lexis” form).

Known gaps — stated plainly

State official-reporter citation formats are not parsed today. Citations in a state’s own official-reporter form — for example N.Y., Cal. 2d/3d, Wis., Wn.2d, N.J., Va., N.H. — are not recognized by our parser and will not appear in your results at all, correct or not. This is different from the regional reporters above (N.W.2d, P.3d, etc.), which generally do work. If you cite a case only in its state official-reporter form, re-cite it in the regional reporter (or a federal reporter, if it has one) to get a check, or treat it as unchecked.
Unpublished opinions outside the WL/LEXIS forms above are frequently outside CourtListener’s indexed record and may come back NOT FOUND even when real.
Agency decisions and tribal court opinions are not covered by CourtListener’s case-law database and are outside our checkable scope.
Very recent opinions can lag CourtListener’s own indexing pipeline by some period after they’re issued; a just-decided case may not be searchable yet.
Non-legal verticals (tax, medical, government contracts) have their own, separately documented source lists and gaps — see /methodology.

How fresh is this?

CourtListener is updated continuously by the Free Law Project, not on a schedule we control; recent opinions may lag behind their issue date as described above. We do not publish a fixed “last indexed” date for CourtListener itself because we don’t control its ingestion pipeline and won’t claim a number we can’t verify — instead, every individual verification result carries its own checked-at timestamp, so you always know exactly when that specific check ran.

What our own adversarial testing found

In our own 200-citation adversarial benchmark (July 2026), run live against production, 0 of 60 fabricated citations were marked VERIFIED, and about 3% of real, correctly-cited cases (2 of 66 tested) came back NOT FOUND due to coverage gaps rather than any fault in the citation itself — including a citation to a well-known real decision. That is why NOT FOUND is treated on this site as a coverage signal, not a fabrication verdict: a fabricated citation and a real citation outside our current coverage produce the same NOT FOUND result, and only you (or your primary-source lookup) can tell them apart. Live, ongoing accuracy numbers are published at /quality.

Full verdict semantics (VERIFIED, UNCONFIRMED, NOT FOUND, RETRACTED, SOURCE UNAVAILABLE) and what each vertical checks are documented at /methodology.

Live coverage

Sanction case database coverage

Separately from the verification engine above: how many publicly reported AI-hallucinated-citation sanction cases we have indexed in our public database, broken down by jurisdiction. This is a live count from our database, queried on every page load — not a static or cached figure.

Last updated: 2026-08-31T18:19:26.056Z (live at request time)

1000

total published sanction cases indexed

By jurisdiction

Honest gaps

This tracks publicly REPORTED sanction cases (court orders, opinions, and transcripts that became public record) — it is not a complete census of every time a court caught an AI-hallucinated citation, since many such incidents are resolved off the record or never surface publicly.
Jurisdiction is recorded as the court’s state/circuit at time of publication; federal multi-district cases are attributed to the state where the presiding court sits, not to every party’s home state.
New cases are added as they are found and verified — this is not a real-time feed of every sanction order issued nationwide the day it happens.

See also the full searchable database at /sanctions-database, our methodology at /methodology, and live accuracy numbers at /quality.