A California Court of Appeals published an opinion specifically to warn other courts about what it found in one attorney's appellate brief: nearly all of the legal quotations were fabricated. Cases that don't exist. Cases that exist but don't say what's attributed to them. Quotes attributed to real cases that appear nowhere in those cases — or anywhere else. All of it generated by AI. The attorney's client lost. The attorney was fined $10,000. The court called it "very conservative" because he seemed genuinely sorry.
Bryan read directly from the appellate opinion: "This appeal is, in most respects, unremarkable. What sets this appeal apart, and the reason we have elected to publish this opinion, is that nearly all of the legal quotations in plaintiff's opening brief and many of the quotations in plaintiff's reply brief are fabricated." The fabricated citations — hallucinated by a generative AI tool the attorney used to draft the brief — were attributed to real published cases that either don't discuss those topics or don't exist at all. Result: the appeal was dismissed as frivolous, the client lost, and the attorney was fined $10,000. The court noted the fine was on the low end because the attorney appeared genuinely remorseful. Bryan connected it to repeated AI-citation horror stories and restated his standing warning: AI tools are not lawyers, AI-generated legal research is not verified legal research, and there is no shortcut to actually reading the cases.
Appellate proceduresanctions for frivolous filingsFederal Rule of Civil Procedure 11
Constitutional question: No major constitutional issue. The case is a civil procedure and professional responsibility matter. The constitutional relevance is indirect: the integrity of the legal record — accurate citation to existing authority — is foundational to the system by which courts exercise judicial power. Fabricated citations corrupt that foundation by asking courts to apply "law" that doesn't exist, which is why courts treat it as not merely a mistake but a sanctionable breach.
Eleven migrants who couldn't be deported to their home countries because of torture risk were instead deported to Ghana — with the US government's assurance that Ghana wouldn't send them back. The US also said, upfront: we have no authority to control what Ghana does after we hand them over. And as soon as they arrived in Ghana, Ghana transferred all eleven back to the countries they'd fled. Some are now hiding. A federal court said there was nothing it could do.
The migrants could not be deported to their home countries under international standards because they faced a credible risk of torture. The DOJ's solution: deport them to Ghana, which provided assurances it would not send them onward to the countries in question. The DOJ simultaneously told the court it had no authority or mechanism to enforce that promise once the migrants left US custody. The plaintiffs — who also alleged they had been shackled, placed in straitjackets for up to 16 hours, and denied access to legal counsel while still in US custody — tried to get the DC district court to intervene before Ghana could send them back. Upon arrival in Ghana, the Ghanaian authorities transferred all eleven migrants to their home countries. The migrants filed for a TRO in the DC district court to block the onward transfer from Ghana; the court denied it, citing lack of jurisdiction over events in a foreign country. The judge was described as "not sounding very happy" about the result. Migrants also filed in Ghanaian courts to try to stop the removals. Some have since gone into hiding. Their attorney: the rushed transfers were "precisely the injury we were trying to prevent."
ImmigrationConvention Against Tortureextraterritorial jurisdiction
Constitutional question: The jurisdictional limit the court cited is a structural feature of US judicial power under Article III — federal courts can adjudicate rights and issue orders against parties within the US, but cannot issue binding orders against foreign governments. The case illustrates a known gap in CAT (Convention Against Torture) implementation: US treaty obligations prohibit sending people to countries where they face torture, but the US can satisfy that prohibition on paper by routing deportations through third countries while disclaiming any responsibility for what those countries do. Whether this conduct violates the spirit (and possibly the letter) of CAT obligations remains unresolved on the merits.
A group of North Carolina protesters who showed up outside a drag show with signs reading "stop grooming children" had their photos manipulated by the restaurant they were protesting — turned into fake ads promoting a drag brunch, as if the protesters were endorsing it. They sued under trademark law. The court said: trademark law is not for your feelings. Case dismissed.
Bryan used this as a trademark law teaching moment. The protesters' images were doctored to look like restaurant endorsements — specifically for the drag brunch they were protesting. They filed suit under the Lanham Act (federal trademark law), arguing the manipulated images infringed their... trademark? Bryan walked through trademark doctrine: the purpose of trademark law is commercial in nature — it protects the link between a producer and their goods/services so consumers can find quality products and producers can benefit from their reputation. Trademark violation requires a commercial financial loss. He illustrated with his rubber duck example: a trademark marks your goods for trade — it protects your commercial reputation and customers' ability to identify your product. The protesters were not selling anything. They had no commercial financial stake in their own images. They were embarrassed and offended. But trademark law doesn't protect those interests. The federal court dismissed the case: no commercial financial loss, no Lanham Act claim.
Lanham Acttrademark
Constitutional question: The Lanham Act's commercial-nexus requirement is a statutory limit that also has First Amendment implications: if trademark law could be invoked to suppress embarrassing uses of one's image without any commercial harm, it would become a tool for chilling expressive speech by defendants. The dismissal preserves the boundary between trademark law (protecting commercial interests) and other potential remedies (state right of publicity, defamation) that might or might not be available for non-commercial reputational harm.
