# Fifth Circuit Vacates Mississippi Judge's DEI Injunction, Citing AI-Hallucinated Errors, and Orders a New Judge

Times of AI Desk · 2026-10-24 · Policy

[https://timesof.ai/2026/10/fifth-circuit-vacates-wingate-ruling-ai-hallucinations](https://timesof.ai/2026/10/fifth-circuit-vacates-wingate-ruling-ai-hallucinations)

> A Fifth Circuit panel has vacated U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate's preliminary injunction against Mississippi's ban on DEI programs in public schools and universities and ordered the case reassigned to a different judge. The opinion cites a temporary restraining order that named people who were never parties, misquoted the law and relied on declarations not in the record, after Wingate said a law clerk had used AI on a draft, and a corrected order that still cited a case that does not exist.

A federal appeals court has thrown out a judge's ruling in part because the orders behind it contained errors that it calls AI hallucinations, and has taken the case away from him. On **Thursday, October 22**, a **Fifth Circuit** panel vacated U.S. District Judge **Henry Wingate**'s preliminary injunction against Mississippi's House Bill 1193, a 2025 law that bars diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in public schools and universities. It directed the chief judge of the Southern District of Mississippi to assign the case to a different judge.

## What the panel found in the orders

Judge **Jerry Smith** wrote the opinion. He said the temporary restraining order Wingate issued on July 20, 2025:

- named as plaintiffs 11 people and groups who had never been parties to the case, and named two officials as defendants who had not been sued;
- misquoted H.B. 1193 as covering terms such as "critical race theory" and "institutional bias," which do not appear in the law;
- relied on declarations from four people who "do not appear in the record at all and may not even exist."

After the state pointed out the errors, the opinion says, the court replaced the order with a corrected version backdated to July 20 and called the mistakes "clerical." According to the opinion, after U.S. Senator **Chuck Grassley** publicly accused the court of using AI, Wingate said in a letter that a law clerk had used AI to help draft an earlier version of the order that was docketed by mistake.

The corrected order still had a problem. At oral argument in the Fifth Circuit, it emerged that it cited "Cousins v. School Bd. of City of Norfolk," a Fourth Circuit case that, the panel wrote, "does not even exist; it is an apparent AI hallucination." Because the August 2025 preliminary injunction incorporated the order's reasoning, the panel said, the made-up case was "arguably part of the shoddy reasoning of the preliminary injunction, too."

## Why the panel reassigned the case

The panel also said Wingate got the law wrong, in particular by not applying the Supreme Court's test for facial First Amendment challenges from *Moody v. NetChoice*. "The district court—or perhaps, being charitable, its AI agent—ignored and manipulated governing law, apparently to satisfy a policy agenda," Smith wrote. The court called reassignment on remand "extraordinary" and "rarely invoked," but said this case "easily calls for" it.

Judge Kurt Engelhardt joined the opinion. Judge Catharina Haynes concurred only in its last paragraph, which vacates the injunction and orders the reassignment.

The Mississippi Center for Justice, which represents the plaintiffs with the ACLU of Mississippi, still called the ruling a win in a statement quoted by **Courthouse News**, because the panel read the law as not barring classroom discussion of issues such as race and sex.

## Limits

- The case now returns to a different district judge; the panel did not decide whether H.B. 1193 is constitutional.
- "AI hallucination" is the panel's description. Wingate's account, as the opinion quotes it, is that a clerk used AI on a draft that was docketed by mistake and that the errors did not affect his legal reasoning.
- Courthouse News said Wingate's chambers and the Mississippi attorney general's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
- We read the full opinion and the Courthouse News report.

## Sources

- [U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit: Jackson Federation of Teachers v. Fitch, No. 25-60496, opinion (October 22, 2026)](https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/25/25-60496-CV0.pdf)
- [Courthouse News Service: Fifth Circuit slams AI rulings in school diversity policy case (October 22, 2026)](https://www.courthousenews.com/fifth-circuit-castigates-ai-rulings-in-school-diversity-policy-case/)