Appeals Court Reassigns Case Over Fabrications and Legal Errors

NEW ORLEANS, Oct. 22 — AnAn appeals court on Thursday took a case away from a federal judge in Mississippi whose orders named parties who were not in it, misquoted the state law they blocked and cited a court decision that does not exist.

The Fifth Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction that Judge Henry T. Wingate of the Southern District of Mississippi had issued against H.B. 1193, the state’s 2025 law against diversity, equity and inclusion programs in public education, and ordered the case assigned “to a different district judge for all further proceedings.” Judge Wingate had admitted last year that a law clerk used an AI tool in drafting the first of the orders.

Judge Jerry E. Smith wrote the opinion for a panel that included Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt. Judge Catharina Haynes concurred in only its last paragraph, the order itself, adding that teachers must not be “limited or forbidden from teaching the students not to discriminate as set out in Title VII.”

The trouble began with a temporary restraining order of July 20, 2025. It named as plaintiffs 11 people and organizations that had never been party to the case, the appeals court found, misquoted the law as reaching “critical race theory,” a term that appears nowhere in it, and cited declarations from four people who “may not even exist.” When the state pointed out the errors, the judge swapped in a version backdated to July 20 and called the inaccuracies “clerical.”

Senator Chuck Grassley, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote to the judge on Oct. 6, 2025, asking whether AI had been used to prepare the order. “These do not appear to be simple slips of the pen or mechanical oversights,” Mr. Grassley wrote.

Judge Wingate answered that a law clerk had used an AI tool called Perplexity “strictly as a foundational drafting assistant,” and that the order was an early draft that had skipped his chambers’ standard review. “It was a draft that should have never been docketed,” he wrote in a letter dated Oct. 21, 2025. “This was a mistake.” In the same letter he said he had used “clerical” to mean that the mistakes were due to “a failure to confirm the accuracy of certain information rather than errors in core legal reasoning or the ultimate judgment on the merits.” The appeals court questioned how the false facts could have had no bearing on the reasoning.

At oral argument it emerged that even the corrected order, which the injunction incorporated, cited “Cousins v. School Bd. of City of Norfolk,” supposedly a 1974 Fourth Circuit decision. “That case does not even exist; it is an apparent AI hallucination,” Judge Smith wrote.The Missing CaseThe citation given, 503 F.2d 422, falls in the middle of a Sixth Circuit case, United States v. Anderson, the opinion says; the pages cited, 426–27, belong to a Second Circuit case, Avis Rent A Car System v. United States.

“This district judge carelessly exercised his Article III power by issuing sloppy edicts based on falsehoods and fabrications,” he wrote. Nor was the law handled better: “The district court—or perhaps, being charitable, its AI agent—ignored and manipulated governing law, apparently to satisfy a policy agenda.” The opinion also faulted the injunction on the law alone: it found the judge had not done the analysis the Supreme Court requires when a law is challenged on its face, had not properly found that the teachers were likely to succeed, and had granted relief broader than the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling in Trump v. CASA allows.

Reassignment is an “extraordinary” and “rarely invoked” power, the opinion acknowledged, but it found Judge Wingate could “reasonably be expected to have substantial difficulty in setting aside previous views.”A Rare PowerThe appeals court may reassign a case on remand under its supervisory power over the district courts. It uses the power so sparingly, the opinion says, that it “has not settled” on which of two tests decides when to do so. No public response from Judge Wingate to the ruling could be found early Friday.

Judge Wingate’s letter showed how close AI sits to the bench: the vendor of his chambers’ cite-checking tool “incorporates AI technology into that feature,” he wrote, though his clerks verify its work. His fix: a second clerk reviews every draft, and every cited case is printed from Westlaw. The judiciary’s interim AI guidance, issued July 31, 2025, 11 days after the first order, recommended that users “review and independently verify all AI-generated content or output,” the director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts told Mr. Grassley that October.

The case returns to the Southern District of Mississippi for a new judge, who must weigh the challenge to H.B. 1193 under the law as the Fifth Circuit laid it out.