Appeals Court Removes Judge Whose AI-Tainted Orders Blocked Mississippi's DEI Ban. A Judge Owes the Public His Own Work.

The facts come first below. My opinion follows in the section marked as opinion.

A federal appeals court has thrown out an injunction against Mississippi's ban on diversity, equity and inclusion programs in public schools and universities. It also took the case away from the judge who issued it after his orders were found to contain errors produced by artificial intelligence.

The ruling came Thursday, Oct. 22, from a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. "We vacate the injunction and remand for reassignment to a different district judge," Circuit Judge Jerry Smith wrote in the court's opinion. The order directs the chief judge of the Southern District of Mississippi to give the case to another judge for all further proceedings.

The law and the lawsuit

Mississippi enacted House Bill 1193 in April 2025. The opinion describes it as a law designed to keep public education funds from being spent on DEI initiatives. It bars schools from mandating DEI programs and diversity training, protects students from punishment for their views on DEI and bars institutions from promoting DEI through course materials. Scholarly work and student groups are exempt.

Teachers, professors, students, parents and advocacy groups sued, claiming the law violates the First Amendment and is unconstitutionally vague. U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate blocked it, first with a temporary restraining order and later with a preliminary injunction.

What went wrong

JURIST reported that the July 2025 restraining order named 11 plaintiffs who did not exist, cited declarations from four people absent from the record and fabricated quotes from the statute. When state officials flagged the errors, the judge replaced the order with a backdated version and called the mistakes clerical. After an inquiry from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Wingate acknowledged in October 2025 that a law clerk had used generative AI to draft it.

Even the corrected order was not clean. At oral argument, the panel discovered it still cited a Fourth Circuit case, "Cousins v. School Bd. of City of Norfolk," that does not exist, according to JURIST.

"The proceedings in the district court were a botch job, to say the least," Smith wrote. He added that the judge "carelessly exercised his Article III power by issuing sloppy edicts based on falsehoods and fabrications," the opinion states.

The panel also faulted the legal reasoning itself. "The district court — or perhaps, being charitable, its AI agent — ignored and manipulated governing law, apparently to satisfy a policy agenda," Smith wrote, Courthouse News Service reported. Judge Kurt Engelhardt, a Trump appointee, joined the opinion. Judge Catharina Haynes, a George W. Bush appointee, agreed with the outcome but declined to sign on to most of the opinion.

Both sides claim something

The ruling does not settle whether the law is constitutional. On remand, the panel wrote, "The plaintiffs have a high burden to show that this policy is unlawful," according to the opinion.

The Mississippi Center for Justice, which represents the plaintiffs with the ACLU of Mississippi, called the ruling a win because the panel read the law as not barring classroom discussion of race or sex. "The court's interpretation addresses one of those major concerns and affirms that these discussions can continue," the center said, Courthouse News reported. In a short concurrence, Haynes wrote that it is "very important to make sure that teachers at school are in no way limited or forbidden from teaching the students not to discriminate," according to the opinion.

Opinion: A judge owes the public his own work

Whatever you think of DEI, every American should be troubled by what happened in that Mississippi courtroom. A federal judge holds a lifetime appointment and the power to stop a law passed by a state's elected legislature. When he uses that power, the people bound by his order are owed his own reading of the record and the law. They got 11 phantom plaintiffs, four declarations from people who were never in the case and a citation to a court decision no one ever wrote.

The error itself is forgivable. Clerks make mistakes, and new tools will tempt busy chambers. What is harder to excuse is the response. By JURIST's account, the judge swapped in a backdated order, called the mistakes clerical and acknowledged the AI use only after a senator's inquiry. Scripture says "He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy." That holds for the bench as much as the pew. A plain confession on day one would have served the judge, the plaintiffs and the court far better.

To be fair to the plaintiffs, their worries about classroom speech were not frivolous, and they won something real: an appellate reading that teachers can still discuss race and sex. Judge Haynes was right to underline that teaching children not to discriminate is no crime. That is the proper way to settle a law's reach: careful reading by an accountable judge, not a machine's invention.

Mississippi's voters, through their legislature, decided how their tax dollars would be spent in their schools. Fights like this one, much like the Colorado, Washington Vote on Girls' Sports Ballot Measures contest, belong first to the people and their representatives. Courts can and should check them, but only with honest work. Now the case goes to a new judge who can give it what it should have had from the start.