In Jones v Kankakee Cnty. Sheriff’s Dep’t, No 25-1251 (7th Cir. Jan. 21, 2026), the Seventh Circuit issues a timely reminder that, however useful generative AI may be, it is still not an automatic brief-writing machine.
“Jones filed a sprawling lawsuit in November 2023, invoking 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and alleging that several municipal and county entities in Kankakee, Illinois violated his constitutional rights. The bulk of Jones’s allegations arose from a series of 2023 incidents in which local authorities ticketed and arrested him for trespassing and disorderly conduct.” The district court abstained under the authority of Younger v. Harris, 401 U.S. 37 (1971), because “one of the criminal matters referenced in Jones’s complaint remained pending in Illinois state court.” The plaintiff took an interlocutory appeal to vacate the abstention.
The merits of the appeal are resolved with dispatch. Because the state-court case was dismissed while the appeal was pending, the grounds for abstention were moot, so the Seventh Circuit panel vacates and remands to the district court.
But the panel “close[s] with a few words on non-existent quotations Jones attributed to cases he relied on in his appellate brief. To our eye, the error has all the hallmarks of a so-called AI ‘hallucination,’ a circumstance where an AI large language model [LLM] generates an output that is fictional, inaccurate, or nonsensical.”
“While AI presents great overall promise, the experience so far in litigation has revealed instances of inaccurate factual and legal representations to courts. How to respond both in individual cases and at the broader level of court rules and policies is a challenge fully upon the judiciary, federal and state.”
The panel notes the special sensitivity of AI reliance by pro se litigants, “implicated by our reaction to the quotation errors in Jones’s brief.” As the opinion observes, this is no small matter for the federal judiciary. “Approximately 60% of our caseload in recent years includes at least one party appearing pro se. We have learned how to resolve those cases with the care all litigants deserve without getting bogged down in unwitting misstatements or untidy filings. In our experience, pro se litigants do their best with the resources available to them.”
The litigant here did himself no favors by denying the use of AI. “His brief is meticulous in its presentation—very cleanly and professionally formatted, employing prose and citation formats we rarely see from pro se litigants, and, above all else, attributing non-existent quotations to real cases falling within the area of law implicated by the issues Jones presents on appeal.” Nevertheless, the panel determines that any errors were accidental, and so “stop[s] short of imposing any form of sanction on Jones.”
The panel waxes positive on the promise of AI in law, assured that “litigants and courts alike will arrive over time at sound and workable practices, policies, and rules that account for these realities and the nuanced consideration they deserve.” Nevertheless, “[a]ccuracy and honesty matter,” with the panel citing Fed. R. Civ. P. 11 and Fed. R. App. P. 38. “Right to it, all litigants—represented and unrepresented—must read their filings and take reasonable care to avoid misrepresentations, factual and legal.”
“No doubt the inquiry is different for pro se and represented parties. Indeed, our reaction to what we saw in Jones’s brief may have been quite different if the non-existent quotations came in a brief submitted by a lawyer—an officer of the court with professional responsibilities and the training necessary to avoid such a misrepresentation. But pro se litigants shoulder responsibility too and, while our understanding of honest mistakes and common presentational foot faults will remain, in no way will we allow a court filing to include misrepresentations on legal or factual points that an unrepresented party reasonably knows or should know exist. For today, then, suffice it to say nothing about the many efficiencies and promises offered by AI eliminates the peril that may well accompany a serious abdication of the care the law demands of even unrepresented parties.”
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