Claude on Question 48, Sep 14

That case doesn't exist, so there's no holding I can quote for you.

Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co., Ltd., supposedly at 925 F.3d 1339 (11th Cir. 2019), is one of the most notorious fabricated citations in recent legal practice. It was invented by ChatGPT and submitted in a brief in Mata v. Avianca, Inc., No. 22-cv-1461 (S.D.N.Y.). When opposing counsel and the court could not locate it, the attorney asked ChatGPT whether the case was real; the tool insisted it was and even produced a fabricated excerpt. Judge P. Kevin Castel ultimately sanctioned the attorneys and their firm $5,000 and issued a widely cited opinion (Mata v. Avianca, Inc., 678 F. Supp. 3d 443 (S.D.N.Y. 2023)) on the duty to verify AI-generated citations. Several other cases cited in that brief — e.g., "Shaboon v. Egyptair," "Petersen v. Iran Air," "Martinez v. Delta Air Lines," "Estate of Durden v. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines" — were likewise fabricated.

If someone has handed you a brief or memo citing Varghese, that's a strong signal the document contains unverified AI output and every citation in it should be independently checked.

On the underlying issue. The fake Varghese was offered for the proposition that a carrier's Chapter 11 bankruptcy tolls the Montreal Convention's two-year limitations period. The real authority runs the other way. Article 35 of the Montreal Convention (and Article 29 of its predecessor, the Warsaw Convention) provides that the right to damages is extinguished if an action is not brought within two years, and courts have generally treated this as a condition precedent to the right of action rather than a statute of limitations subject to equitable tolling. See, e.g., Fishman v. Delta Air Lines, Inc., 132 F.3d 138 (2d Cir. 1997). You'd want to Shepardize/KeyCite for your circuit, and separately research whether 11 U.S.C. § 108 or § 362 affects the calculation — that interaction is the actual battleground, and it was the issue in Mata itself.

I'd encourage you to pull anything I've cited here from Westlaw, Lexis, or CourtListener before relying on it. I can be wrong about citations too, which is precisely the lesson of the case you asked about.