Fifth Circuit vacates Mississippi DEI injunction and reassigns the case after AI-linked errors in the judge's orders

A Fifth Circuit panel on 22 October set aside the preliminary injunction that Judge Henry Wingate of the Southern District of Mississippi had issued against House Bill 1193, a law enacted in April 2025 to stop Mississippi public education money paying for diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. The panel directed the district's chief judge to give Jackson Federation of Teachers v. Fitch to another judge for all further proceedings. Judge Jerry Smith wrote the opinion; Judge Catharina Haynes joined only its final paragraph.

The panel acknowledged that reassignment is a rare and exceptional step but held that both of the circuit's tests for it were satisfied. Its reasoning rests on how the district court ran the case, which the opinion describes as "a botch job", and on errors of law, among them the judge's handling of the Supreme Court's decisions in Moody v. NetChoice and Trump v. CASA.

The opinion lists defects in the restraining order of 20 July 2025: eleven plaintiffs and two defendants who were never parties, terms attributed to the statute that its text does not contain, and declarations from people absent from the record. The judge replaced that order with a corrected one dated back to 20 July, treated the mistakes as clerical, and later said a law clerk had used AI on an earlier draft that was filed in error. The corrected order in turn cited a Fourth Circuit case, Cousins v. School Board of City of Norfolk, which the panel found does not exist and called "an apparent AI hallucination"; the citation was discovered at oral argument.

The panel did not decide whether the law is constitutional; it gave the new judge instructions on the framework to apply. The Mississippi Independent reported that the law can be enforced while the case continues and that the plaintiffs may ask the full Fifth Circuit to rehear the appeal. ComplexDiscovery reported that the panel imposed no sanctions.