In a precedential opinion the Pennsylvania Superior Court held that a pro se appellant who relied on hallucinated authority had waived her claims for failure to cite pertinent authority, rather than imposing a sanction

What the court found

The appellant, proceeding pro se, appealed the dismissal of a partition action against her former spouse. The appeal failed on several independent grounds, and the court noted that her claims would also fail on the merits.

The court then turned to two authorities cited in her brief. It described them as so nonsensical and disconnected from the appellant's claims that it concluded they were hallucinated citations.

It did not leave that as an impression. In a footnote it traced each one. The reporter citation given for the first authority in fact leads to a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision with a different name, and the closest approximation to the case name the appellant gave is a decision of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island rather than any decision of the Commonwealth.

The second fared worse. The reporter citation leads to a different Pennsylvania Superior Court case entirely, and the court found the case name the appellant supplied to be, in its words, an entirely fabricated caption coupled with a hallucinated citation.

The mechanism the court used for the fabricated authority

Having established that, the court did not reach for a sanction. It reached for waiver.

One point of precision first, because it bears on how much weight the holding carries. This appeal did not turn on the fabricated citations. The court addressed preservation before anything else, finding claims waived under Pa.R.A.P. 302(a) because they were not raised in the trial court, and then held in the alternative that even if not disposed of on that basis the cited authority did not support the claims. The citation holding comes later and is introduced with the word also, making it a further ground rather than the one that decided the appeal.

It held that after reviewing the filings the appellant had not referenced any relevant authority to support her arguments, that she had misrepresented, misstated and fabricated authority, and that accordingly she had also waived her claims by failing to cite to pertinent authority in her appellate brief, citing Pa.R.A.P. 2119(a) and two prior decisions.

This is worth separating from the sanctions cases carefully. A sanction is a discretionary response to misconduct: it needs a vehicle, usually a motion or a rule to show cause, a finding about the filer's state of mind or diligence, and a proportionality judgment. None of that happened here.

Waiver needs none of it. The briefing rule requires citation to pertinent authority; a fabricated case is not pertinent authority; the requirement is therefore unmet and the claims are gone. An appellate court can reach that conclusion on its own review of the brief, in the ordinary course, without initiating anything.

The extension to pro se litigants

The court framed its observation conditionally, saying that to the extent the appellant had employed generative AI tools to draft her brief, as indicated by her repeated misrepresentations of valid statutes and precedential opinions and her reliance on hallucinated authority, it wished to note a passage from its earlier decision in Saber.

That passage is the part with forward effect. It states that the use of GAI to draft legal filings, including by pro se litigants, without verification of the accuracy of the content produced, may lead to misstatements or misrepresentations of legal authority, and that such material, if further disseminated, would undermine the sense of accuracy and reliability of the law it purports to reference.

The parenthesis is doing real work. Much of the professional discussion about AI in filings is anchored in duties owed by admitted lawyers, whether under rules of professional conduct, certification rules or a court's inherent authority over its officers. A self-represented litigant is not an officer of the court and is not subject to those duties.

What this opinion identifies is a consequence that does not depend on them. The briefing rules apply to every filer, and a brief that cites nothing pertinent fails on its own terms regardless of who wrote it or what wrote it.

Why the dissemination point matters

The quoted passage gives a reason for concern that goes beyond the individual case: fabricated authority, if further disseminated, would undermine the sense of accuracy and reliability of the law it purports to reference.

That is a systemic rather than a party-focused rationale. The harm identified is not only that one litigant misled a court, but that fabricated citations entering the record and the reporting systems degrade the reliability of legal authority itself.

It is also the reason a court might treat the issue as worth addressing in a precedential opinion rather than disposing of it quietly. The footnote tracing each fabricated citation to what the reporter number actually contains serves that purpose: it puts on the record what the real authorities are, so the fabricated ones are corrected rather than merely rejected.

For anyone building verification practice, that footnote is also a usable method. Each hallucination was caught by checking the reporter citation against the case name, and in both instances the number resolved to a real but entirely different case. That is a mechanical check, not a judgement call.

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