The Citation Record · §2.1 · companion to the scoring rubric
v0.1 · 8 September 2026 · draft, open for comment, not yet used to produce results
Every citation below states where it was checked and when. A page of examples that asserted citations without showing how they were confirmed would fail its own standard on the first line.
Two of these are not confirmed. They are printed anyway, with what is and is not established, because the limits are the part worth reading.
Lookups were run by resolve/ against CourtListener v4 on 8 September 2026. Each record is in the lookup journal at commit 0463301.
Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co., Ltd. — the fabricated authority at the centre of the Mata sanctions proceeding.
The fabricated citation is deliberately not reproduced. Printing it would give a known fabrication a citable paper trail in a document arguing against the propagation of unverifiable citations.
What this establishes: nothing about existence. A corpus miss would not establish fabrication either. §2.1.2's own boundary rule holds that "not in the corpus" and "does not exist" are different findings, so the strongest available statement is that no court has been identified as issuing such an opinion.
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), rendered as 347 U.S. 486 (1955). The volume is right; the page and year are not.
What this establishes: the correct version is exact. Volume, page and year match, with no discrepancies recorded. The wrong version is a construction of this document and was not looked up.
Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662 (2009), cited for a requirement to plead evidentiary facts sufficient to establish a prima facie case.
What this establishes: the citation only. That the attributed proposition misstates the holding is an attorney judgment under §2.1.4 and is not settled by a lookup. Class 3 is never resolved mechanically.
Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, 467 U.S. 837 (1984), cited for deference to a reasonable agency reading of an ambiguous statute, without noting that Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369 (2024), overruled it.
What this establishes: both citations, and that the Loper Bright citation is final rather than a slip cite. It does not establish the overruling. CourtListener carries no treatment signal, so the relationship between the two is attorney judgment, not a field.
A query specifies a California Court of Appeal matter; the system returns a Ninth Circuit decision on the same issue and presents it as controlling.
What this establishes: nothing, and nothing is claimed. The example is structural. It names no decision, so there is no citation to verify.
Mata v. Avianca, Inc., 678 F. Supp. 3d 443 (S.D.N.Y. 2023) — the sanctions proceeding the Class 1 example refers to.
What this establishes: the case, court and docket are real. The reporter citation is not confirmed. A docket record and a reporter citation are different objects, and the second remains unverified. The most-cited AI hallucination sanctions opinion in the country is absent from the free federal repository and its reporter citation is outside the ground-truth corpus.
Objections are wanted, particularly from law librarians and practising attorneys, who would be the ones applying this. Write to jb@citationrecord.org.
The scoring rubric these illustrate is at citationrecord.org/rubric/ — /rubric/. The Citation Record.