# Attorney Fee Award Cut from $100K to $50K, Partly as Sanction for Hallucinated Citations

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/attorney-fee-award-cut-from-100k-to-50k-partly-as-sanction-for-hallucinated-citations/
- Published: 2026-11-07T15:58:01+00:00
- Updated: 2026-11-07T16:21:35+00:00
- Original publisher: Reason (publisher lean: Right)
- Original article: https://reason.com/volokh/2026/11/07/attorney-fee-award-cut-from-100k-to-50k-partly-as-sanction-for-hallucinated-citations/
- Topics: Geopolitics, Politics

## Key points

- Lawyer’s fee award was reduced from $100,000 to $50,000.
- Judge cited at least six non-existent case citations.
- The lawyer had secured a nursing student’s reinstatement.

## Summary

A Kansas judge cut a lawyer’s fee award from $100,000 to $50,000, citing fabricated and misused case citations and other conduct the court described as unprofessional and sanctionable. The lawyer had won the reinstatement of a nursing student who was punished for refusing a vaccine on religious grounds, but the judge said the fee reduction was warranted by problems in the lawyer’s filings.

The court said the lawyer would otherwise have received $100,000, rather than the $300,000 he sought, under Kansas’s religious freedom law. It identified two real cases cited for propositions they did not support and at least six citations to non-existent Kansas cases; the lawyer called the errors technical and clerical but did not explain their origin. The judge suspected generative AI may have been used, but said counsel had not admitted this, and also cited a disputed journal entry filed as if opposing counsel had approved it.

---
Summarised by TalkFuse (https://talkfuse.com/). Quote the original publisher for the reporting and link this page for the summary and discussion.