Negative Treatment Check

Negative Treatment Check

Purpose

Organize a disciplined "is this still good law" check for every authority cited in a draft or research memo. For each authority, the skill records the citation as provided, structures a verification plan using available connectors and any user-supplied citator reports, and classifies the authority's verification status. It never asserts from model memory that a case is good law, has been overruled, superseded, limited, or distinguished — model-memory treatment claims are exactly the hallucination this library exists to prevent. Every treatment conclusion is either drawn from a provided, attributed source or left as an explicit [Verify current law] item for attorney confirmation. This is draft legal work product for attorney review, not legal advice.

Use When

• A research memo or brief is nearly final and every cited authority needs a good-law check before it is filed or relied upon.
• A user asks "is this case still good law?" or "have any of these authorities been overruled?" and wants the verification organized rather than guessed.
• A citation list has been assembled and the team needs a treatment-verification plan before an attorney signs off.
• Citator reports have been pulled from a vendor service and the signals need to be organized into a per-authority status table.
• A cited authority is old, from a fast-moving area, or central to the argument, and its current status must be confirmed.

Required Inputs

• The draft, memo, or citation list whose authorities need checking, with each authority's full citation as it appears in the source. If only a description is provided, request the actual citations — never reconstruct a citation.
• Optional: any citator reports or validation printouts the user has already obtained from a citation service. These are recorded as attributed claims from a provided source.
• Optional: access to a citation-verification connector (for example, connectors/courtlistener.md for federal case law) — used to confirm that an authority exists and to retrieve its text and later history where the connector supports it.