A federal appeals court has removed a judge from a closely watched case after concluding that his rulings were built partly on material an AI system made up. In an opinion filed on October 22, a three-judge panel of the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a preliminary injunction that US District Judge Henry Wingate had issued against Mississippi's House Bill 1193, and told the federal trial court in southern Mississippi, through its chief judge, to put a different judge in charge of everything that follows.
The underlying dispute concerns a 2025 Mississippi law that bars public schools and universities from spending public money on diversity, equity and inclusion programmes, mandatory diversity training and related activities. Teachers, professors, students, parents and advocacy groups challenged it before it took effect, arguing that it violates the First Amendment and is unconstitutionally vague. Judge Wingate first blocked the law with a temporary restraining order in July 2025 and then with a preliminary injunction that August.
According to the appeals court, the original restraining order described plaintiffs and defendants who were not part of the lawsuit, cited declarations from people who never took part, misquoted the statute and claimed that programmes had already been shut down without any support in the record. When state lawyers flagged the problems, the district court swapped in a revised order dated two days earlier and refused to keep the first version on the docket, calling the mistakes clerical. After a US senator raised the issue publicly, the judge conceded that one of his clerks had relied on an AI tool when preparing the first draft. Bloomberg Law reported that the tool was Perplexity.
The revised order was not clean either. During oral argument before the 5th Circuit, it emerged that it still relied on a 1974 Fourth Circuit decision, Cousins v. School Board of City of Norfolk, which no court ever issued. Writing for the panel, Judge Jerry Smith called the district proceedings a botch job and said the judge had issued sloppy orders based on falsehoods, while also faulting the legal analysis behind the injunction. The court noted that reassignment on remand is an extraordinary step it rarely takes, but held that this case easily qualified.
Judge Catharina Haynes wrote a short concurrence. She joined the instruction to reassign the case and said the next judge should take a fuller look at the law, adding that teachers must remain free to teach students not to discriminate on the grounds protected by federal civil rights law. Judge Kurt Engelhardt was the third member of the panel.
The ruling is one of the sharpest judicial responses yet to generative AI errors coming from the bench rather than from lawyers. Courts have spent the past three years sanctioning attorneys for filing briefs with invented citations, and several have adopted disclosure rules for AI use. Here the fabricated material appeared in orders that carried a federal judge's authority and temporarily blocked a state law, which the panel treated as grounds to doubt that the same judge could handle the case impartially on remand.
The decision lets Mississippi enforce the law while the challenge continues before a new judge, and further review by the full 5th Circuit or the Supreme Court remains possible. Reuters also reported the ruling, but its article could not be accessed for this story, so the account above relies on the opinion itself and on reporting from Bloomberg Law and Law.com.