Pure Hallucination
🚧 Under construction
This entry is a placeholder — the canonical write-up is still in progress and may be incomplete or change substantially. Please don't treat it as final or authoritative yet.
Definition
A pure hallucination is an entirely fabricated citation — a wholly fictitious case that does not exist at all. It is distinct from a mutant / synthetic citation (which splices together real citation elements into a false combination) and from a hallucinated summary (a real case whose holding or quotation is misrepresented). Pure hallucinations are the most famous and most obvious type — the kind at issue in the classic Mata v. Avianca — and the easiest to catch, because the case simply cannot be found in any database.
Why it matters
Worked examples
Cases that exemplify this failure mode
- Mata v. Avianca (S.D.N.Y., 2023) — 6 instances
- Lafayette v. Blueprint Basketball (Vermont Superior Court, 2024) — 2 instances
- Pavlovich v. National Life Insurance Company (VT, 2010)
- State v. Dalco Electric, Inc. (VT, 2015)
- Kasten Berry Inc. v. Stewart (D. Kan., 2024) — 1 instance
- Novitzky v. TransUnion (C.D. Cal., 2024) — 2 instances
- Dowlah v. PSC-CUNY (New York Appellate Division, 2024) — 1 instance
- Garner v. Kadince (Utah Court of Appeals, 2025) — 1 instance