Mick Hartley

It’s the story that keeps on giving. The Sandie Peggie tribunal judgement, that is.

A landmark legal ruling on trans rights has been thrown into doubt after it emerged that a judge used “false and non-existent quotes” to support his findings.

It’s not just the Maya Forstater case “made-up” quote. The whole thing is riddled with errors.

The certificate of correction aimed to draw a line under the matter but The Times has established that Kemp’s ruling contained a second bogus citation, prompting calls for an investigation into how this could have happened in such a high-profile case.

It is not clear whether this was a case of human error or if AI had “hallucinated” false data which appeared in the ruling after going unchecked.

Dr Michael Foran, an associate professor of law at the University of Oxford, claimed the errors were clear and significant. “It is an incontrovertible fact that the judgment includes supposed quotes from specific judgments that do not appear in those judgments,” he said. “That in itself is extraordinary. How this happened and what consequences will flow from it are unclear at this point, but there are incredibly serious questions that need to be answered.”

He added: “It is not clear to me that the tribunal even has the power to reissue the judgment with these quotations removed. The power that permits reissuing judgments is confined to correcting clerical errors and accidental slips or omissions, not substantial changes of this magnitude.”

Peter Daly, a lawyer who specialises in employment law, said the blunders would undermine confidence in the legal system. “The common law system relies on the principle that judgments contain reliable reports of the authorities on which they rely,” he said.

“The suggestion that non-existent quotes from case law have been used in any court judgment is therefore of the utmost seriousness because it is potentially a threat to the functioning of our legal system. It is important that the suggestion that it has happened in the Peggie judgment is publicly acknowledged, investigated and resolved without any delay, in order to maintain public trust in the law.”

Perhaps that horse has already bolted – in Scotland, at any rate..

One senior legal figure claimed the failures would almost certainly lead to the judgment being withdrawn entirely or overturned on appeal.

“Serious questions must be asked as to how this was allowed to happen,” they said. “For the biggest case held in the Scottish courts this year to be undermined in such a serious way is nothing short of jaw-dropping. People will now have to go through every other case that Kemp has dealt with and cross-check all the references.”

They claimed suggestions that AI had been used in the production of the ruling must be assessed. “Perhaps the most charitable explanation is that the judge has used AI and it has hallucinated, citing non-existent quotes from previous rulings,” they said. “But whatever has gone wrong, this is extremely serious and completely unprecedented. Judge Kemp must immediately refer himself to the Judicial Conduct Investigations Office.”

To a non-legal expert like me, it looks very much like judge Kemp had swallowed the whole trans ideology bit, and was also driven by a class view that saw Peggie as an uppity trouble-making working class woman, against the fragrant and well-spoken middle class doctor “Beth” Upton.

Anyway Peggie has appealed. This one will run and run.