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Volker v. Nygaard

Court
SC North Dakota
Jurisdiction
USA
Decided
2026-02-26
AI tool
Implied
Outcome
Case dismissed with prejudice
Monetary penalty
None reported

What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Volker repeatedly filed briefs containing fictitious, AI-generated case citations; the district court found them fictitious and dismissed the case with prejudice as a Rule 11 sanction.

Details

The district court found Volker repeatedly submitted fictitious, AI-generated case citations and dismissed his action with prejudice as a Rule 11 sanction. The Supreme Court dismissed Volker's appeal as untimely, leaving the sanction and judgment in place.

Sanction teardown · SC North Dakota, USA · 2026-02-26

Volker v. Nygaard

What happened

In SC North Dakota, USA, 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:

  • Fabricated (Case Law)
    Volker repeatedly filed briefs containing fictitious, AI-generated case citations; the district court found them fictitious and dismissed the case with prejudice as a Rule 11 sanction.

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

Case dismissed with prejudice

Additional detail

The district court found Volker repeatedly submitted fictitious, AI-generated case citations and dismissed his action with prejudice as a Rule 11 sanction. The Supreme Court dismissed Volker's appeal as untimely, leaving the sanction and judgment in place.

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/1590/Volker_v_Nygaard_USA_26_February_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/1590/Volker_v_Nygaard_USA_26_February_2026.pdf

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