Sanction teardown · Federal Court, Canada · 2026-01-19
Amit Arora v. Canadian National Railway
What happened
In Federal Court, Canada, a filing relied on an unnamed/unconfirmed AI tool to help draft legal argument. The court identified the following problems with the citations in that filing:
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Fabricated (Case Law)Cited a nonexistent case 'Manitoba v. CHRC, 2016 FC 836' as authority for a proposition about reply affidavits; Court found no such case at that citation and that the paragraphs cited did not support the proposition.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Cited 'CP Rail v. Canada (AG), 2015 FC 1348' which the Court determined does not exist and is a hallucinated authority.
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Misrepresented (Legal Norm)Asserted the legal proposition that 'reply affidavits served within the Rule 312(1) window do not require leave'—the Court found this proposition to be false and misstates the law.
Which AI tool
an unnamed/unconfirmed AI tool. Note: Charlotin's public database records tool attribution only where a court order, brief, or reporting on the matter states it explicitly; "unidentified" or "implied" means the record indicates AI use but does not name a specific product — we do not guess.
Outcome
Admonishment
How Citation Safe would have caught this
Citation Safe runs three deterministic layers before a brief is filed: (1) does the citation exist against CourtListener's database of published opinions, (2) if quoted, does that exact language appear in the source, (3) does the cited case actually support the proposition it is cited for. Fabricated case citations fail Layer 1. Fabricated or misattributed quotations fail Layer 2 even when the underlying case is real. Misrepresented holdings — a real case cited for a proposition it does not support — are the target of Layer 3. None of these checks involve asking another language model whether the citation looks right; they are lookups and text-matches against the actual source, which is why a hallucinated citation has to survive a direct lookup against the authoritative source — not another model's opinion — to earn a VERIFIED stamp; our measured false-verify rate is published live at /quality.
Check a brief before you file it → · See our live false-verify rate
Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/1753/Arora-v.-Canadian-National-Railway-2026-FC-82.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).