A federal appeals court went through a lower court’s order at oral argument. One case it cited, Cousins v. School Bd. of City of Norfolk, was supposed to be a Fourth Circuit decision. There’s no such case. And this was the corrected order. The appeals court used the word “hallucinated.”
The Journal printed the passage on Saturday’s opinion page, in its Notable & Quotable slot, under the headline AI Judge. It’s from a Fifth Circuit panel decision dated Oct. 22, written by Judge Jerry E. Smith. The case is Jackson Federation of Teachers v. Fitch, a challenge to a Mississippi law, H.B. 1193. We’ll leave the law itself to the courts. The story here is the paperwork.
The appeals court called the lower-court proceedings “a botch job.” Judge Henry Wingate’s first order blocking the law included facts that appeared nowhere in the record. It listed parties on both sides who weren’t in the complaint. It cited sworn statements from people who didn’t exist or were never there. It quoted the law with words the law doesn’t contain. It said the law had already killed programs that appear to be made up. When that came out, the judge swapped in a corrected order without saying why. Then he issued a longer-term injunction that folded the corrected order in. At oral argument, the appeals judges found the corrected version still had a phantom case in it.
The excerpt never says who or what drafted the order. The Journal’s headline, AI Judge, draws its own conclusion. Hallucinated is the word people use when an AI tool invents a fact and states it with a straight face. Whatever did the drafting, a federal courthouse let invented facts through twice. If it can happen there, it can happen in a will, a trust letter or a tax memo.
Our read
This is estate and paperwork territory (Estate, with a consumer-protection note, M11). More people now draft letters, beneficiary notes and even wills with an AI tool. Some lawyers and advisors do too. The output reads clean and sure of itself. That’s the trap. A confident citation is worth nothing until someone opens the source. The judge’s order looked fine until the appeals court went looking for Cousins. Our rule at the desk is simple. Anything with a number, a date or a citation gets checked against the thing it came from before it’s signed.
The piece of your plan this touches is your estate documents and the beneficiary forms behind them. Here’s the check for this week. Pick one document you signed in the past year that someone, or something, drafted for you. Find one fact in it, a statute, an account number, a date, and confirm it against the source. If it holds, good. If it doesn’t, you’ve just found the umbrella before the rain. That’s what a plan review is for.