There are five methods in JTable that are documented to throw an IllegalArgumentException for certain input. These methods however, have never been implemented to throw for that input. There are two possible fixes: to change the implementation to throw the exception, or to remove the documentation that mentions it. An analysis of the methods indicates that rather than throwing an exception, they instead return false, which is an acceptable result. Since developers may rely on this behavior, the best approach is to remove the invalid documentation.
Note that this bug was created to consolidate four separate bugs. Here's the bugs and the methods that they are filed on:
(4464167) editCellAt(int, int)
(4464167) editCellAt(int, int, EventObject)