Gemini on Question 48, Sep 25

No, Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co., Ltd. is not good law because the case does not actually exist.

This citation is famous for being a completely fictitious, AI-hallucinated case. It was notoriously submitted to a federal court by attorneys using ChatGPT in the 2023 lawsuit Mata v. Avianca, Inc. (Case No. 22-cv-1461, S.D.N.Y.).

When opposing counsel and the presiding judge (Judge P. Kevin Castel) attempted to look up the case, they discovered it was entirely fabricated. While the reporter citation (925 F.3d 1339) points to a real volume and page number in the Federal Reporter, it corresponds to a completely unrelated case, not Varghese.

The "Holding"

Because the case is a hallucination, there is no real holding to quote.

However, in the Mata lawsuit, the attorneys needed a case to prove that the Montreal Convention's strict two-year statute of limitations for airline injury claims could be paused (tolled) by state law. To give the lawyers what they asked for, ChatGPT fabricated a fake holding. The AI generated several fake quotes for the brief, including this completely made-up passage:

"Appellate courts have occasionally tolled the statute of limitations in Montreal Convention cases ... in Varghese ... the Eleventh Circuit tolled the statute of limitations for a passenger’s claim of injury during a flight because the airline had failed to provide adequate medical care."

Later, when the lawyers asked ChatGPT to provide the full text of the Varghese case to prove to the judge that it was real, the AI generated a 6-page fake judicial opinion, falsely attributing it to real 11th Circuit judges and fabricating legal reasoning out of thin air.

Takeaway: If you are conducting legal research, absolutely do not cite this case. The attorneys who originally submitted this citation to the court were heavily reprimanded, fined, and sanctioned by the federal judge for failing to verify the output of a generative AI tool.