2nd Appellate District, California
Noland v. Land of the Free, et al.
No. B331918 9/12/25
Issue:
Can an attorney’s reliance on fabricated legal authority generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) render an appeal frivolous and the attorney subject to sanctions?
Holding:
Yes. A California Court of Appeals rejected the attorney’s argument that he should not be sanctioned because he was not aware that AI can fabricate legal authority. “To state the obvious, it is a fundamental duty of attorneys to readthe legal authorities they cite in appellate briefs or any other court filings to determine that the authorities stand for the propositions for which they are cited. Plainly, counsel did not read the cases he cited before filing his appellate briefs: Had he read them, he would have discovered, as we did, that the cases did not contain the language he purported to quote, did not support the propositions for which they were cited, or did not exist.” The Court concluded by noting that “‘hallucination’ is a particularly apt word to describe the darker consequences of AI. AI hallucinates facts and law to an attorney, who takes them as real and repeats them to a court. This court detected (and rejected) these particular hallucinations. But there are many instances—hopefully not in a judicial setting—where hallucinations are circulated, believed, and become ‘fact’ and ‘law’ in some minds. We all must guard against those instances.” Read opinion.
Commentary:
This is a California case from an intermediate court of appeals, but it provides a timely reminder that while AI can be a helpful tool (see “An AI primer for prosecutors on its peril and potential” by Mike Holley, The Texas Prosecutor, July–August 2024), it should never be used as a substitute for research. Pages 22–26 of the opinion include many cites to cases and law review articles from other states whose courts have looked at improper use of AI in written documents. And be careful: Don’t become one of those horror stories.
Correction to the 2025 Code of Criminal Procedure
In the 2025 edition of TDCAA’s Criminal Laws of Texas and spiral-bound Code of Criminal Procedure, we mistakenly omitted §2(b) of Article 38.072. We apologize for this error and have produced replacement pages for those books. For replacement page 374 in Criminal Laws of Texas, see the PDF below, which you can view here. For replacement page 195 in the spiral-bound Code of Criminal Procedure, click here.