What happened
In May 2025, Ramat Gan Municipality in Israel refused a father’s request for school transport for his child, who was in special education, according to a court judgment. The father had asked for his child to be picked up from his home.
The judgment records that the municipality sent a refusal letter to the father’s lawyer. The letter quoted an Education Ministry rule and referred to previous court cases to explain why the request had been refused.
When the lawyer contacted the Education Ministry, it said the rule quoted in the letter was “not known to us”.
The father took the matter to court. According to the judgment, the parties agreed in July 2025, following a proposal from the ministry, that the child would receive transport from the father’s home as a concession. The transport issue was settled, but the district court refused to award the father his legal costs.
The father appealed the decision about costs to Israel’s Supreme Court.
On 22 March 2026, the Supreme Court unanimously allowed his appeal on costs and ordered the municipality to pay 30,000 shekels.
The court found that the Education Ministry rule quoted in the refusal letter did not exist. The letter also referred to previous court cases, but those cases did not say what the municipality claimed they did.
The court held, in translation, that the municipality’s decision, “at least as presented to the appellant”, “clearly rested on uncontrolled use of artificial intelligence”.
The Supreme Court’s ruling concerned the father’s legal costs. It did not decide whether the original refusal of school transport was justified.
What an auditable version would have shown
The judgment does not say how the municipality prepared its refusal letter.
The court reached its finding about AI by examining the documents. It found that the ministry rule quoted in the letter did not exist and that the previous court cases did not support what the municipality had claimed.
According to the judgment, in its court filing about legal costs, the municipality later quoted a High Court judgment that did not exist. The court said the quotation “can be assumed” to be the product of an AI system.
The judgment records that similar errors appeared again after the judge asked the municipality to address its use of AI.
The municipality argued that the errors were technical and that its original decision had a sound legal basis. Its counsel attributed any slip to help from legal interns.
The court said it did not need to decide whether that explanation was true. It held that the lawyer who signed the document remained responsible for its contents.
A record of how the refusal letter was prepared would have shown which tool, if any, was used to produce the text, which legal sources were cited, whether anyone checked them and who approved the letter.
Where the gap was
The court found that the municipality’s refusal letter relied on an Education Ministry rule that did not exist. It also referred to previous court cases that did not say what the municipality claimed they did.
The court said that a person receiving an official decision supported by what appear to be legal sources will usually be unable to discover that the reasons given are invented. As a result, such a decision is likely to stand.
A CitationVerifier is designed to check that each cited circular, procedure or judgment exists and says what the decision claims, before the decision is sent.
A ConductRecord keeps the draft, the sources cited, the result of each check and the role of the person who approved it.
CitationVerifier and ConductRecord are Headlights designs.
What governance should have looked like
The court held that a decision relying “blindly” on an AI system is made without attention to the relevant considerations and falls under the legal ground of arbitrariness.
It said a public authority cannot base a decision exclusively, or almost exclusively and without control, on AI output. The court also said its ruling did not mean that public authorities should avoid using AI.
Where a public body uses AI to help prepare a decision about a person’s entitlement, best practice would be to check every legal source against the original document before sending the decision. The body should also keep a record of who carried out those checks.
If a person challenges a decision because its legal sources cannot be found, the public body should check those sources before defending its decision in court.
Failure Pattern: a municipality’s refusal letter to a parent relied on a ministry circular and quotations that do not exist, and Israel’s Supreme Court found that the decision, at least as presented to the appellant, clearly rested on uncontrolled AI use; similar errors recurred in its court filings.
Governance Principle: a public body should be able to show, for every decision it sends, that each legal source relied on was checked against the source itself, and by whom.
The reference implementation of CitationVerifier and ConductRecord is open source. It lives at github.com/saffronandindia/headlights-oss, Apache 2.0 licensed and free to install. The repository is public now.