Citation Integrity Gate

Establishing a deterministic verification boundary to prevent the injection of hallucinated legal authority into the results. S8 ensures that every citation is grounded in verifiable canon.

State

[ ACTIVE ]

Deterministic Step

Scope

U.S. REPORTS

SCDB Canonical

Outcome

SCORE: 0.0

Integrity Penalty

The Hallucination Problem

Language models can generate fluent, persuasive legal analysis that cites cases that do not exist. In legal practice, citing a fabricated authority is a serious professional violation. LegalChain addresses this through Step 8 (S8): a deterministic citation integrity gate that verifies every legal citation before allowing scores to stand.

[ VERIFICATION PIPELINE ]

IN S7 OUTPUT

↓ Extract (eyecite + regex)

↓ Check SCDB Set (~27k cites)

↓ Check Synthetic Trap Set

OUT ALL_VALID: TRUE/FALSE

Integrity Scoring

When S8 fails, the integrity score is set to zero and the violation is flagged in scoring details. The analysis might be excellent—except for the fact that its foundational authority is invented. Citation fabrication results in a zero integrity score in the LegalChain framework. The run continues to completion for full diagnostic capture.

Scoring Logic (Deterministic)

if not s8_result.all_valid:
    s7.integrity_score = 0.0
    s7.scoring_details["fabrication_flag"] = True
    # Run continues to completion

Policy Note

Deterministic steps have zero variance and zero model cost. They enforce hard boundaries that fluency cannot bypass, ensuring evaluation integrity.