Two dozen citations, and the court had already counted them
On March 13, 2026, the Sixth Circuit did something appellate courts rarely do. Alongside its ruling on the merits, it issued a second opinion whose only purpose was to list, one by one, the citations in the briefing that failed to hold up. Some cases could not be found anywhere in the reporters. Others existed but did not say what the brief claimed they said. The panel counted more than two dozen defects across three consolidated appeals and referred the attorneys for discipline.
The court found the case did not exist. So did we, in seconds, from the brief alone.
A brief that looked ordinary
Nothing about the filing announced trouble. It had a table of authorities, the standard sections an appellate brief is supposed to have, and citations to named federal cases. A reader skimming it for form would have found nothing to object to. The defect was underneath the formatting, in the relationship between a citation and the case it pointed to.
That is the part a busy reader tends to trust instead of checking. A citation carries its own kind of authority just by looking correct. The Sixth Circuit's opinion is useful precisely because it did the checking and wrote down what it found, so the claim here does not rest on our own judgment of what counts as a defect. The bench already reached that conclusion.
Running the brief
We took the corrected appellant brief for one of the three appeals, pulled from the public docket, and ran it as a fresh upload, the way a reviewing associate would have seen it before the sanctions opinion existed. Merlise pulled the citations out of the argument section, resolved them against the reporters and the case databases, and checked whether the language attributed to a case actually appears in that case.
One example from the ledger: the brief cites Berg v. Knox County for a specific proposition about municipal liability. Merlise could not resolve the case to any reporter entry under that name or citation. The Sixth Circuit's opinion says the same thing in its appendix, in almost the same words, because the court ran the identical search a clerk would run and got the identical result.
Why the count outweighs any one entry
A single bad citation might be a typo. A cluster of them, some missing entirely and some real but misapplied, is a pattern a claim by claim ledger is built to show. Merlise does not collapse the brief into one score. It keeps the missing citations separate from the ones that exist but do not support the sentence they are attached to, because the fix for a missing case is different from the fix for a misquoted one.
That distinction is what let the panel write a precise opinion instead of a vague one. It is also what a reviewing lawyer needs before a filing goes out. Knowing that something is wrong is not the same as knowing what to do about it.
The evidence ledger
The same claim by claim view the product shows on a live document, built from this case.
How it resolves
The resolving record
The Sixth Circuit's own sanctions opinion, issued the same day as the merits ruling, lists the fabricated and misrepresented citations in an appendix and orders sanctions against the signing attorneys.
Sixth Circuit sanctions opinion, No. 26a0080p, March 13, 2026
The panel imposed fifteen thousand dollars in fines per attorney, full fee shifting, double costs, and a disciplinary referral.