Cite check desk: capabilities and limits

A walkthrough (fictional)

Fictional matter — demonstration: Invented names and facts; nothing here is a real client, party, court or filing.

Every name, party, court and matter below is invented for illustration.

1. An invented associate pastes a draft appellate brief for a fictional appeal, Calloway v. Brightwater Marine.
2. The deterministic Bluebook layer flags form errors and pinpoint gaps; with CourtListener configured, each case citation is checked for existence; with a licensed citator, for negative treatment.
3. Each citation shows what was checked, against which source, when, and what remains unknown; the firm's hard-stop policy, when on, blocks export on a refuted citation.

Mechanisms

• —The deterministic Bluebook engine
• —The existence layer (CourtListener) and the citator slots (Westlaw, Lexis) when keyed
• —The statute currentness monitor
• —The firm hard-stop policy against the export gate

Limits

• —Format-checked only is the floor when no citator is configured; a perfectly formatted citation can still be fabricated
• —Treatment is never claimed without a licensed citator result

What this desk refuses

From the refusals catalogue (9 rows apply); the full catalogue is at /refusals.

• Running a paid desk without an active session, a trial allotment or a covering purchase.

  Sign in, use the trial allotment, or purchase the matter.

• A citation rendering a higher verification label than the layer that actually ran.

  Configure the citator; until then the label reads format-checked only.

• Representation of any kind: filing, service, negotiation with a party, or appearance, for anyone.

  A licensed attorney represents; the platform prepares.

• Reaching a matter, review, draft, comparison or governed version that belongs to another tenant, or through a removed membership.

  Work inside an active membership of the matter's tenant.

• Reaching a matter the user is screened from, on any surface, including background execution.

  The firm lifts the wall in the record; authorized colleagues keep their work.

• Sending a byte to a vendor outside the permitted list, over a non-https scheme, to a private network, or with a data class the vendor is not cleared for.

  The owner reviews the constant; the surface reports the refusal instead of substituting a vendor.

• Parsing an upload whose bytes do not match its declared type, whose archive expands beyond the fixed limits, or whose "text" is not text.

  The receipt names the failed check; attach a genuine PDF, Word file or plain text.

• A request path carrying a literal or encoded backslash, an invalid escape, double encoding or a control character.

  Request the route as published.

• Exporting or finalizing with a refuted citation or a drift-flagged statute when the firm's hard-stop policy is on.

  Resolve each blocking citation; with the policy off the citation is labelled, never blocked.

Inputs

• —A brief as a file or pasted text

Outputs

• —Findings by citation with the verification label
• —The Westlaw-style checklist
• —The hard-stop verdict when the policy is on