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Frustrated by fake citations and flowery prose packed with “out-of-left-field” references to ancient libraries and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a New York federal judge took the rare step of terminating a case this week due to a lawyer’s repeated misuse of AI when drafting filings.
In an order on Thursday, District Judge Katherine Polk Failla ruled that the extraordinary sanctions were warranted after an attorney, Steven Feldman, kept responding to requests to correct his filings with documents containing fake citations.
One of those filings was “noteworthy,” Failla said, “for its conspicuously florid prose.” Where some of Feldman’s filings contained grammatical errors and run-on sentences, this filing seemed glaringly different stylistically.
It featured, the judge noted, “an extended quote from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and metaphors comparing legal advocacy to gardening and the leaving of indelible ‘mark[s] upon the clay.’” The Bradbury quote is below:
“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
Another passage Failla highlighted as “raising the Court’s eyebrows” curiously invoked a Bible passage about divine judgment as a means of acknowledging the lawyer’s breach of duty in not catching the fake citations:
“Your Honor, in the ancient libraries of Ashurbanipal, scribes carried their stylus as both tool and sacred trust—understanding that every mark upon clay would endure long beyond their mortal span. As the role the mark (x) in Ezekiel Chapter 9, that marked the foreheads with a tav (x) of blood and ink, bear the same solemn recognition: that the written word carries power to preserve or condemn, to build or destroy, and leaves an indelible mark which cannot be erased but should be withdrawn, let it lead other to think these citations were correct.
I have failed in that sacred trust. The errors in my memorandum, however inadvertent, have diminished the integrity of the record and the dignity of these proceedings. Like the scribes of antiquity who bore their stylus as both privilege and burden, I understand that legal authorship demands more than mere competence—it requires absolute fidelity to truth and precision in every mark upon the page.”
Although the judge believed the “florid prose” signaled that a chatbot wrote the draft, Feldman denied that. In a hearing transcript in which the judge weighed possible sanctions, Feldman testified that he wrote every word of the filings. He explained that he read the Bradbury book “many years ago” and wanted to include “personal things” in that filing. And as for his references to Ashurbanipal, that also “came from me,” he said.
