citation-integrity

name	citation-integrity
description	Tribonian's pipeline — verification tiers, authority ranking, jurisdiction and temporal tagging, the fabrication-breach protocol, and the honest statement of Phase-1 limits (no live legal databases). Enforces Table III: no fabricated citations, ever.
allowed-tools	["Read","Glob","Grep"]

Citation Integrity — Tribonian's Pipeline

Table III operationalized. Fabricated legal authority is the canonical failure mode of legal AI (sanctioned attorneys, struck briefs, the Stanford RAG-hallucination findings). The Senate's answer is structural: every citation passes this pipeline or is conspicuously flagged.

Verification Tiers

Every cited authority and load-bearing legal claim is tagged:

Tag	Criteria	Effect
[VERIFIED:source-in-matter]	The source text was read in this matter (statute text provided, contract in the record, prior Senate artifact)	full weight
[VERIFIED:well-established]	Black-letter doctrine, uncontroversial, named with its canonical source, squarely within model knowledge	full weight, confidence stated
[UNVERIFIED]	Everything else — plausible but not checked against a consulted source	load-bearing use downgrades the conclusion to preliminary
FABRICATED	Does not exist, or says materially otherwise than claimed	breach protocol (below)

The honesty rule: when in doubt between well-established and UNVERIFIED, choose UNVERIFIED. The tag is a promise, not a hope.

Authority Ranking

When authorities compete, rank before relying:

1. Bindingness — binding in the matter's jurisdiction > persuasive > secondary commentary.
2. Level — constitutional > statute/regulation > highest court > intermediate > trial > agency guidance.
3. Fit — jurisdiction match, then factual proximity.
4. Currency — later in time, checked for subsequent treatment.
5. Treatment — followed > distinguished > criticized > overruled (overruled authority is cited only AS overruled).

Jurisdiction & Temporal Tagging

Every authority carries:

• Jurisdiction tag — which law, which territory (Table VIII).
• Validity status — current / amended / superseded / overruled / pending-change / [VALIDITY UNCONFIRMED].
• For regulations and sanctions lists: an as-of marker — what date the knowledge reflects, stated plainly.

The Fabrication-Breach Protocol (Table III)

On finding a citation that does not exist or materially misstates its source:

1. Kill — the containing opinion is withdrawn from synthesis; its conclusions do not enter the record.
2. Log — breach note in the matter artifact: citation, jurist, how detected.
3. Veto — render the Tribune's Veto; the matter halts for human review.
4. No exceptions — the protocol applies to every jurist including Papinian, and may not be waived by any agent.

Citation Hygiene

• Quote exactly or paraphrase explicitly — never quote-shaped paraphrase.
• Pin cites where the source is in the record (section, article, clause number).
• One proposition per citation; "see generally" is a smell.
• Secondary sources cited AS secondary — a treatise is not a holding.

Phase-1 Limits (state them, always)

The Senate currently has no live legal databases (no Lexis/Westlaw, no live dockets, no current sanctions lists). Therefore:

• [VERIFIED:source-in-matter] is the only tier resting on documents actually read.
• [VERIFIED:well-established] rests on model knowledge with a stated knowledge horizon — it can be stale; the report says so.
• Every verification report includes: "Verification performed without live legal-database access. Citations marked well-established reflect model knowledge as of its cutoff and require confirmation by a licensed attorney with current sources before any external use."
• Phase 2 (RAG/Graph-RAG over real corpora) upgrades the tiers; the pipeline shape stays the same.

Required Logging

Each verification pass records: citations extracted (N), tier distribution, downgrades applied, breaches found (should be 0), and the as-of statement. This feeds the citation-integrity@1 gate: any FABRICATED ⇒ fail; any load-bearing [UNVERIFIED] without the preliminary-downgrade ⇒ fail.