Whiting v. City of Athens: a federal appeals court fines two lawyers $15,000 each for briefs with 'over two dozen fake citations'

The problem

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit consolidated several appeals brought for Glenn Whiting against the City of Athens, Tennessee, and various officials, arising from an incident at the city’s 2022 annual fireworks show. On its initial review of the briefs — filed by Whiting’s attorneys Van R. Irion (Law Office of Van R. Irion, Knoxville) and Russ Egli (The Egli Law Firm, Knoxville) — the court noticed problems: “many of the cases cited in Whiting’s briefs either did not exist, did not include the quoted language he claimed they did, or did not discuss or support the proposition for which Whiting cited them.” As the court put it, “we found over two dozen fake citations and misrepresentations of fact in Whiting’s briefs,” a total its own footnote called “a conservative estimate.” That pattern — bulk fabricated citations — is the signature of generative-AI “hallucination.”

What was built

This is not a technology deployment; it is an AI-governance outcome. The court ordered Irion and Egli to show cause, and its directives included telling the court “whether they used generative AI to write the briefs” and explaining how they cite-checked. “Irion and Egli did not respond to these directives,” instead calling the show-cause order “void on its face” and a product of “harassment.” The court declined to make an express finding that generative AI produced the citations, ruling instead that no filing “should contain any citations—whether provided by generative AI or any other source—that” a lawyer has not personally “read and verified.” It sanctioned the attorneys under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 38 (frivolous appeal) and the court’s inherent authority — not Rule 11.

The outcome

On March 13, 2026, the panel (opinion by Circuit Judge John K. Bush; Stranch, Bush, and Murphy, Circuit Judges) held that “Irion and Egli must each separately and individually pay $15,000 to the registry of this court as punitive sanctions for the proceedings in this court in all three appeals” — $30,000 combined. It further ordered them, jointly and severally, to “reimburse appellees in full for their reasonable attorneys’ fees on appeal in all three appeals” and to “pay double costs to appellees for costs incurred under 28 U.S.C. § 1920.” Finally, “the clerk will forward a copy of this order to the chief judge to consider disciplinary proceedings under Sixth Circuit Local Rule 46.” Two mutually independent newsrooms corroborate the $15,000-each figure and the fabricated-citations finding: Reason/The Volokh Conspiracy (which reproduces the sanction paragraph) and Local 3 News/WRCB-TV Chattanooga (“pay $15,000 each to the court”).

Path to green

The origin is a published federal appellate opinion — self-authenticating; no client-confirmation call is booked against the court, and no green badge is claimed here. Before any human sign-off, the checker should confirm the March 13, 2026 sanction has not been disturbed by rehearing, en banc review, or the Supreme Court (CourtListener docket for ca6 152857). The question of which AI tool, if any, produced the citations is deliberately left open — the court declined to find AI use, and no claim in this record asserts it.