CiteWarden — Forensic Citation Checking, Because AI Fabricates References With Total Confidence
The $5,000 hallucination In Mata v. Avianca, Inc. , 678 F. Supp. 3d 443 (S.D.N.Y. 2023), a federal judge sanctioned lawyers $5,000 after they filed a brief citing six court decisions that ChatGPT had invented. That was 2023 — the failure mode hasn't gone away, it's just everywhere now: student essa
In Mata v. Avianca, Inc., 678 F. Supp. 3d 443 (S.D.N.Y. 2023), a federal judge sanctioned lawyers $5,000 after they filed a brief citing six court decisions that ChatGPT had invented. That was 2023 — the failure mode hasn't gone away, it's just everywhere now: student essays, grant proposals, court filings, and yes, dev blog posts.
CiteWarden is the checking layer. It reads text the way a paranoid reference librarian would. Built for LexHack 2026 (AI × Law × Civic Tech).
Beyond "does this exist," CiteWarden runs fully offline forensics: reporter volume-range bounds, reporters cited before they existed (any F.3d cite dated before 1992 is impossible), decision years contradicting the volume era, malformed titles, placeholder artifacts, and same-cite/conflicting-year collisions.
Score = 100 − 100·(red/total) − 30·(amber/total), floored at 0. You can compute it yourself from the report.
Every shipped row was machine-checked at build time: the 464 landmark cases were parsed from Wikipedia's curated index with volume-bounds, volume-era consistency, and year sanity gates (1791–2026); build logs live in research/. The Mata v. Avianca watchlist contains the six fabricated citations transcribed verbatim from the sanction order.
If you review manuscripts, grade papers, or file briefs — paste your next document in before someone else finds the problem.