Facts
In June 2025 teachers, students, parents and organisations challenged Mississippi's House Bill 1193, an April 2025 law restricting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in public schools and universities, as contrary to the First Amendment and void for vagueness. According to the Fifth Circuit, the temporary restraining order issued on 20 July 2025 by Judge Henry Wingate of the Southern District of Mississippi named non-parties as plaintiffs and defendants, relied on declarations absent from the record and misquoted the statute. The court replaced it without explanation with a corrected version backdated to 20 July, and granted a preliminary injunction on 18 August 2025. In an October 2025 letter the judge attributed the errors to a law clerk's use of AI.
Question
The State defendants appealed the preliminary injunction. The panel had to decide whether it could stand given the legal standards the district court applied, in particular the Supreme Court's framework for facial First Amendment challenges in Moody v. NetChoice and its ruling on the scope of injunctions in Trump v. CASA. It also had to decide whether to use its supervisory power to have the case heard by a different judge on remand, a step the Fifth Circuit describes as extraordinary and rarely invoked. At oral argument it emerged that the “corrected” order, incorporated by reference into the injunction, still cited a Fourth Circuit case that does not exist.
Decision
In an opinion by Judge Jerry E. Smith, the panel vacated the injunction and directed that the case be assigned to a different district judge. The district court had not carried out the Moody analysis, had treated legal uncertainty as a reason to “pause” the law instead of requiring a likelihood of success, and had misread CASA on the scope of relief. Reassignment was warranted under both circuit tests: having removed the hallucinated material without explaining why the order still stood, the judge could be expected to have difficulty setting aside earlier views, and an objective observer might question the proceedings' impartiality. The panel set out the law for the new judge. Judge Haynes concurred only in the final paragraph.
Why it matters
Unlike sanctions cases about lawyers' filings, here the fabricated content appeared in a judge's own orders, and the appellate court took it into account when ordering reassignment, alongside its findings of legal error. The events the panel said framed its reassignment holding include replacing an order without explanation, backdating the corrected version and refusing to restore the original to the docket. The ruling does not decide whether House Bill 1193 is constitutional; that question goes to the new judge.
Related stages
The panel was Judges Smith, Haynes and Engelhardt. The TRO was issued on 20 July 2025 and the preliminary injunction on 18 August 2025 (S.D. Miss. No. 3:25-CV-417); the district judge's letter is dated 2 October 2025. Judge Haynes wrote separately that teachers must in no way be prevented from teaching students not to discriminate as set out in Title VII. The case returns to the district court for reassignment. For other decisions on AI-fabricated authorities, see mata-v-avianca, ayinde-v-haringey-fake-citations and arihq-v-sante-quebec-ai-arbitral-award-annulled; on judges' own use of AI, see colombia-constitutional-court-chatgpt-judge.
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