Fifth Circuit vacates injunction built on an AI-hallucinated order and reassigns the case

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has vacated a preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate and ordered the case reassigned to a different judge, in a published opinion filed on 22 October. The case, Jackson Federation of Teachers v. Fitch, challenges Mississippi’s H.B. 1193, a 2025 law the opinion describes as designed to keep public education funds from being spent on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Judge Jerry Smith wrote the opinion for a panel with Judges Catharina Haynes and Kurt Engelhardt.

This post is about what the opinion says on AI. It takes no side on the underlying law.

What went wrong, per the opinion

• The first order. Judge Wingate’s July 2025 temporary restraining order, the opinion says, named plaintiffs and defendants not in the complaint, cited “declarations” from non-existent or never-present people, quoted text that is not in H.B. 1193, and described the demise of “apparently fictitious programs”.
• The quiet swap. Two days later the court removed the order from the docket and replaced it with a corrected version backdated to 20 July, calling the errors “clerical”. The opinion credits the state for keeping a copy of the original as an exhibit.
• The admission. After Senator Chuck Grassley accused the court of using AI, Judge Wingate wrote that a law clerk had used AI to help draft an earlier version that was docketed by mistake.
• The error that survived. At oral argument in the Fifth Circuit, the panel found the corrected order still cited “Cousins v. School Bd. of City of Norfolk”, a Fourth Circuit case that “does not even exist; it is an apparent AI hallucination.” That corrected order was incorporated into the preliminary injunction.

The panel called the proceedings “a botch job, to say the least”, and wrote that the district court, “or perhaps, being charitable, its AI agent”, “ignored and manipulated governing law.”

The ruling

The panel vacated the injunction, remanded, and directed the chief judge of the Southern District of Mississippi to assign the case to a different district judge. On reassignment, it reasoned that a judge who simply removed the AI-generated “facts” without explaining why the order still stood might struggle to set aside his earlier views, and that an objective observer could question the proceedings. The opinion also lays out how the new judge should analyze the law.

Judge Haynes concurred only in the final paragraph, the part that vacates and reassigns. She wrote separately that the remand should take a fuller look at H.B. 1193 and that teachers must not be barred from teaching students not to discriminate.

Why it matters

Fake citations in lawyers’ briefs have drawn sanctions for years. This is a federal appeals court treating AI errors in a judge’s own orders as part of the reason to take a case away from him. For anyone using AI to draft legal or official documents, the rule the opinion applies is simple: the person who signs is answerable for every fact and every citation, and correcting errors quietly does not cure them.