Evans v. Robertson

What sanction did the court impose?

Judge Levy struck both parties' objections to the report and recommendation (ECF Nos. 140, 143), holding that despite their certifications and the court's warnings the objections contained factitious citations, and that the parties had "violated the Court's express requirements, misrepresented the law to the Court, and wasted the Court's time." She also struck Evans's motion for leave to file a late objection to a separate order and the late objection itself (ECF Nos. 141, 142) because neither carried the citation certification the magistrate judge required. Footnotes add that both parties' certifications omitted the required statement that each citation "stands for its asserted proposition," which could itself have been a basis to strike. With the objections stricken, the court adopted the report and recommendation, granting in part and denying in part Robertson's motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction and failure to state a claim and denying her motion to dismiss for failure to join parties. The order does not describe the striking as a sanction and imposes no monetary penalty.

Why does Evans v. Robertson matter for law firms using AI?

Evans v. Robertson is a pro se suit for copyright infringement, defamation, fraud, and harassment (as the September 2025 order describes it) in which both sides have repeatedly filed briefs with what the court calls “factitious” citations. The docket shows an escalating sequence. In September 2025 Magistrate Judge Stafford flagged nonexistent and misattributed citations by both parties, remarked that they were “presumably a product of using artificial intelligence (AI) software,” and ordered each party to certify in every future filing that each citation was personally checked, accurate, and stands for its asserted proposition. In November 2025 Judge Levy found both parties’ continued factitious citations “tantamount to bad faith” or wanton, revoked their electronic filing privileges for the case, and warned that future factitious citations would draw additional sanctions, including monetary sanctions of $100 per brief.

The July 21, 2026 order applies that framework to the parties’ objections to a report and recommendation. The examples it describes are misstatements of real authority: Mitan v. Campbell, which the court says holds the opposite of the republication rule Evans attributed to it, and two Sixth Circuit decisions Robertson cited for burden-of-proof rules they do not state. The court treated even one such citation as a violation of its prior orders and struck both objections. It separately struck Evans’s late objection and motion for leave because they lacked the ordered certification entirely.

The order does not mention AI and does not impose the monetary sanction the November 2025 order had forecast; it strikes the filings and proceeds to adopt the recommendation on the merits.