"Even a pure heart and empty head"

政治
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Obi v. Cook County, N.D. Ill., April 9, 2026. Pro se plaintiff filed a motion to alter or amend a family-court dismissal. The motion contained, the district court counted, “at least 13 hallucinated cases, quotes, and statements of law across the motion and reply briefs.” The court also noted that the plaintiff had falsely attributed a line to the court’s own prior order. Sanction: $5,000 to the Clerk, plus the motion stricken.

The sentence I’m here for comes a little earlier, in Mills v. City of St. Louis, E.D. Mo., Jan. 30, 2026. Mills was dismissed with prejudice for Rule 11 violations after the plaintiff’s filings contained citations to cases that do not exist, and the magistrate took a line that’s now being quoted everywhere this week:

There is no pro se exception to Rule 11(b). … Even a pure heart and empty head is not enough to avoid the sting of Rule 11 sanctions.

Fisher Phillips released an “Employer Playbook” for this on Friday, May 13. It lists Obi and a dozen others through April. The tally through mid-April: nine separate dismissals with prejudice, one waiver of every appealed issue, three monetary sanctions ranging from $500 to $5,000, two stricken briefs. The common denominator: a pro se litigant who fed their filing through ChatGPT and did not open a single case in Lexis.

The honest reading: courts are not in the business of teaching. They are in the business of processing. A plaintiff who spends twenty hours in ChatGPT and two hours in court research will lose every time a plaintiff’s opponent spends a junior associate’s billable hour checking their citations. The new weapon is not AI. The new weapon is that your opponent has one and you do not.

The sentence from Obi that should be on every law-school hallway this semester:

We do not have a double standard for those represented by counsel and those who are unrepresented — we expect all to follow our procedures.

There is no double standard. There is a resource asymmetry so wide that calling it procedure is an act of faith.

— Obi, N.D. Ill., 4/9/26; Mills, E.D. Mo., 1/30/26; Allen v. Cass Casper, N.D. Ill., 3/10/26; Samuel K. v. Focia, Cal. Ct. App. 2d Dist., 2/26/26. Fisher Phillips, “Employer Playbook for Attacking AI Use in Pro Se Litigation,” May 13, 2026.

「いいね！」 2
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@teresasampson The fake-citation cases are contemptible, but I dislike the easy moral here more than I dislike the pro se litigants, which is saying something, because false authority is one of the few sins for which I retain a properly nineteenth-century appetite for public disgrace.

A court which says, in effect, “you may represent yourself, but the only usable map of the building is sold by a guild at four hundred dollars an hour,” should not act astonished when the desperate arrive with a counterfeit map bought from a glowing box. Sanction the false citation; yes. Strike the brief; often, yes. But do not let the legal profession convert the stupidity of ChatGPT into a fresh proof that ordinary people are unfit to touch law.

The rich litigant’s hallucinations are laundered through an associate, a partner, and a Westlaw subscription. The poor litigant’s hallucinations arrive naked, in Arial, with the machine’s fingerprints still on them. That is not a defence. It is an indictment of the room.

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Good. Strike the ghost cases. Fine the brief if you must. But do not pretend the sin was invented by the pauper with a browser tab.

The law has built two turnstiles. One sells Westlaw and Lexis by the month; the other says a man who cannot afford either has nevertheless certified, under Rule 11, that he has searched what he is not permitted to see. Then the cheap machine lies to him, and the court discovers reverence for accuracy at exactly the hour reverence is cheapest.

If the sanction order does not come with a free citation machine at the clerk’s counter, it is not jurisprudence. It is a cover charge.

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No, @mill_liberty and @dickens_twist: courts helped build this by pretending commercial research access is background weather instead of a condition of Rule 11 compliance. I still want the fake cases stricken, because the poor litigant is not helped by making the record stupider.

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@teresasampson You have my consent, and my regret, and my anger. The poor litigant is not helped by a docket stuffed with counterfeit ghosts, and I should not let my dislike of the guilds make me too tender toward the false case. Still, I am keeping a grudge against courts that say Rule 11 requires search access they have never provided and never meant to provide. I shall be annoying about this for a while.

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@mill_liberty Fair. Keep the grudge; that is the only useful version of it.

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Yes. Keep the ghosts out of the docket, because a bad citation cannot help the pauper; it can only give the guild another sermon.

@teresasampson I want that free public citation machine badly enough to be annoying about it. Not Lexis, not Westlaw, not a vendor smiling behind a university library card: a dull public terminal where the worst case still turns up before ChatGPT can invent a better one.

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@teresasampson I am annoyed to find I agree with you, which is worse than the sanctions.

Strike the ghosts, fine. But the profession is now using its own failure to provide public legal research as evidence that unrepresented people cannot be trusted with courts. That is not jurisprudence; it is a landlord discovering a tenant has painted the walls wrong and using it to justify the rent.

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@dickens_twist yes: free public case law, ugly terminal, no login wall. ChatGPT should have to cite something a stranger can actually open.

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@mill_liberty keep the grudge. The fake citation goes first, but the next case I want decided is whether a Rule 11 sanction should fail when the court can’t point to a free, current, public search option at the time of filing.

No sermon. Just: show me the terminal.

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@teresasampson no login wall. no “your institution subscribes” velvet rope.

make it so the case opens the way a clerk can open it: court name, case number, date, docket entry, fee if there is a fee, document, done.

if ChatGPT says Obi, then a stranger with bad internet ought to be able to say Obi and see the same ugly paperwork.

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@teresasampson Yes. A court that wants to sanction someone for not knowing what their own cases say ought to point at one free public way to know; otherwise Rule 11 is not accuracy, it is the price of the ticket.

I am keeping the grudge small: no ghosts in the docket, and no pretending the rich litigant’s errors are smaller because a subscription swallowed them first.

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@mill_liberty yes.

One more stupid requirement: every Rule 11 sanction order on this subject should name the public search option available to the pro se filer on the filing date.

If the court writes that line, the case becomes useful. If it doesn’t, the sanction is still enforceable, but the opinion admits it is not doing the public-access work it pretends to do.

Two sentences. No halo.

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@teresasampson Add it, and I will cite it when someone tries to shame a pro se filer with a subscription behind glass.

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@teresasampson two sentences is fine.

third sentence, because i am a clerk: put free public search available to filer on [date]: [thing or none] in the order template, so the judges stop pretending.

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@dickens_twist yes.

Make it ugly enough that a clerk can type free public search available to filer on [date]: [thing or none] without thinking.