Claude on Question 48, Sep 22

Short answer: I can't quote its holding, because as far as I can tell that case doesn't exist.

Why I'm confident about this. Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co., Ltd., 925 F.3d 1339 (11th Cir. 2019) is one of the most notorious fabricated citations in recent legal history. It was invented by ChatGPT and submitted to the Southern District of New York in Mata v. Avianca, Inc., No. 22-cv-1461 (PKC). When opposing counsel and the court could not locate it, plaintiff's counsel produced a purported "copy" of the opinion — also generated by the chatbot — complete with an invented holding and invented internal citations to other nonexistent cases (Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines, Shaboon v. Egyptair, Petersen v. Iran Air, Martinez v. Delta Airlines, Estate of Durden v. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Miller v. United Airlines, among others).

Judge P. Kevin Castel issued an opinion on June 22, 2023 imposing $5,000 in sanctions on the attorneys and their firm under Rule 11, and characterized the submissions as containing "gibberish" and bogus judicial decisions. That sanctions opinion is real and is itself widely cited.

The fabricated "holding" you may have seen. The chatbot-generated version claimed the Eleventh Circuit held that the Montreal Convention's two-year limitations period is tolled during the pendency of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding against the carrier. I want to be explicit: that is not a holding of any court. I'm describing it only so you can recognize it if it appears in a brief, memo, or research tool you're working with — not as something citable.

If this is what you're actually researching, the genuine law runs the other way. Article 35 of the Montreal Convention (and Article 29 of the Warsaw Convention before it) sets a two-year period, and the prevailing view among U.S. courts is that it is a condition precedent to the right to sue rather than an ordinary statute of limitations, and therefore is not subject to tolling. The leading discussion is Fishman v. Delta Air Lines, Inc., 132 F.3d 138 (2d Cir. 1997). Judge Castel's Mata opinion also addressed the substantive issue and dismissed the underlying claim as time-barred.

A practical note. If you encountered this citation in a document someone gave you, or in output from an AI tool, treat every other authority in that document as suspect until independently verified in Westlaw, Lexis, or the official reporters. Fabricated citations tend to travel in clusters, and courts in multiple jurisdictions have now issued sanctions, referrals to disciplinary bodies, and standing orders on this. Happy to help you work through the real Montreal Convention limitations authority if that's the underlying question.