Was Jackson Fed of Tchr v. Fitch sanctioned over AI-generated citations?

Jackson Fed of Tchr v. Fitch (CA Fifth Circuit, October 22, 2026) is a documented matter involving citations that could not be verified against the reporters named. The recorded outcome was: Preliminary injunction vacated and remanded with direction to assign the case to a different district judge; no sanction imposed. No monetary penalty in this order.

Which AI tool was involved in Jackson Fed of Tchr v. Fitch?

The order in Jackson Fed of Tchr v. Fitch does not identify a specific generative tool by name. The court treated the citations as the product of an unverified AI-assisted drafting workflow.

October 22, 2026 · AI sanctions database

Jackson Fed of Tchr v. Fitch

Jackson Fed of Tchr v. Fitch is one matter in the Veritas record of US court proceedings involving AI-generated citations that could not be verified against the reporters named. The summary below is drawn from the underlying court document, linked at the foot of this page.

Court: CA Fifth Circuit
Date: October 22, 2026
Party: Other
AI tool: Not identified in the order
Outcome: Preliminary injunction vacated and remanded with direction to assign the case to a different district judge; no sanction imposed
Penalty: No monetary penalty in this order.

What the record shows

The Fifth Circuit vacated a preliminary injunction against a Mississippi education statute and ordered reassignment. The citation problem here arose in a district court's own orders, not in a party's filing. The majority reported that the original temporary restraining order named parties and declarations absent from the record and quoted language not found in the statute, and that the district judge later wrote that a law clerk had used AI to assist in drafting an earlier version docketed by mistake. It also reported that oral argument revealed the replacement order still cited a Fourth Circuit case, Cousins v. School Bd. of City of Norfolk, which the majority said does not exist and called an apparent AI hallucination. No tool was named and no sanction was imposed. One panel member concurred only in the last paragraph of the majority opinion.

This entry reflects the court document as filed. The citations at issue could not be located in the reporters named at the time of the order. The reading here is descriptive of the public record and is not legal advice.

Source documents

Primary court document ↗ · CourtListener record ↗

The test this filing did not run

Every matter in this record shares one mechanism: a citation that did not resolve to an opinion in the reporter named, in a brief that was filed before any verification step ran. Veritas runs that step. The Filing Risk Scanner extracts each citation, resolves it against reporter and public-record sources, and returns a verdict on each one — located, partial, or not located in reporter — before the brief is signed.

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Filed under · AI sanctions database · CA Fifth Circuit

About this publication

Veritas is a pre-filing citation verification platform for law firms and in-house counsel. Every post on the audit log is written by the Veritas editorial team and cross-checked against the underlying sanctions order, standing order, or published opinion it references. Reporter citations are read in their named volumes. Quotations from court orders are checked against the docket.

The product was built by Andrew Zoll, founder of Veritas, who tracks generative AI sanctions in federal and state courts and turns each documented failure mode into verification logic the scanner runs. Veritas was built after the canonical Mata v. Avianca sanctions order made the verification gap a published failure mode of the bar.

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