A concise excerpt from the extensive ruling in Jackson Fed. of Teachers v. Fitch, issued yesterday by Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, joined by Judge Kurt Engelhardt:
In April 2025, Mississippi enacted House Bill 1193 (H.B. 1193), a statute intended to bar the use of state education funds for diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”) initiatives and other similarly controversial programs. The measure prevents government-run institutions from requiring activities such as diversity training or promoting DEI ideology, as defined by the statute, during official government-funded activities.
H.B. 1193 pursues four principal objectives. First, it stops educational institutions from mandating DEI programs and diversity trainings in a range of contexts. Second, it safeguards students from sanctions based on their views about DEI. Third, it forbids regulated institutions from endorsing or promoting DEI through course materials. Finally, it restricts institutions and their educators from engaging in DEI methods or actions, preventing bad actors from evading the prohibitions and undermining the statute’s purpose. The law also establishes an administrative process to adjudicate claims of noncompliance by a given educational entity. H.B. 1193 explicitly excludes certain activities from its reach, including scholarly work, student and student-group activities, and creative engagement.
Plaintiffs challenged the measure, arguing among other grounds that it violated the First Amendment, but:
The proceedings in the district court were, to put it mildly, badly handled. Judge Henry Wingate issued a temporary restraining order (“TRO”) enjoining enforcement of H.B. 1193 that rested on a string of factual assertions not supported by the record, or by any procedure in the case. Those included references to plaintiffs and defendants not named in the complaint, purported “declarations” from individuals who did not exist or were not present, misquotations claimed to be from the text of H.B. 1193, and several erroneous assertions that the law had already toppled apparently fictitious programs.
After these issues came to light, Judge Wingate replaced the TRO without offering any explanation.
Despite the botched TRO, Judge Wingate proceeded to issue a pre-enforcement preliminary injunction. The various state defendants appealed.
During oral argument before this court, it emerged that even the “corrected” TRO—which was incorporated by reference into the preliminary injunction—still contained hallucinated material (notably, a citation to a purported Fourth Circuit case, “Cousins v. School Bd. of City of Norfolk,” which does not exist).
This district judge negligently exercised his Article III power by issuing rulings founded on falsehoods and fabrications. When some of these fabrications were exposed, Judge Wingate remained firm in his position and claimed that the invented assertions had no bearing on the reasoning; he offered no rationale for why such seemingly irrelevant material appeared in the original TRO or why the TRO could be justified despite its omissions.
Moreover, the district court misapplied the law. The TRO and the preliminary injunction rested on thin legal analysis that barely acknowledged the Supreme Court’s precedents or those of this circuit, at times appearing to distort the law by selectively quoting statutes and cases without regard to their overall textual meaning. The district court—or, if one is charitable, its AI assistant—ignored and manipulated controlling law, seemingly to advance a policy agenda.
Because of these extraordinarily grave errors, we vacate and remand for assignment to a different district judge. Following the Supreme Court’s Moody decision, we instruct the new judge to conduct proceedings in line with federal law as interpreted by the Supreme Court and this court….
The original TRO—the one actually issued on July 20, 2025—named as plaintiffs eleven individuals and organizations that had never been parties to the case; named as defendants two officials who were not actually sued; asserted, without evidence, that three post-secondary institutions had already canceled DEI initiatives or programming because of the act; further claimed, again without evidence, that staff at another school had been told not to discuss certain topics, including “historical interpretations involving systemic racism”; misquoted H.B. 1193 as applying to “race or sex stereotyping,” “race or sex scapegoating,” “critical race theory,” and “institutional bias,” even though none of these terms appear in the text; and referenced supposed declarations by four individuals who do not appear in the record and may not even exist….
On July 22, 2025, the defendants moved to clarify these errors. In response, the court, without explanation, replaced the original TRO with a seemingly corrected version. Although that document was filed on July 22, it was backdated to July 20. The defendants requested that the original order be restored to the docket to preserve the record and asked the court to explain the inaccuracies in the initial order. The district court denied that request, labeling the factual inaccuracies as merely “clerical.”
In response, U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley accused the district court of using artificial intelligence (“AI”) to draft the TRO, with substantive errors arising from AI-generated hallucinations. Fifteen days later, Judge Wingate admitted the errors, explaining that a law clerk had employed AI to help draft an earlier version of the TRO that had been docketed by mistake. In a letter, he said he had removed the original TRO from the docket to avoid confusion and described the errors as clerical, since they did not affect the core legal reasoning or the ultimate merits, but rather reflected a failure to verify certain information.
The allegedly corrected TRO did not explain why the factual inaccuracies were not essential to the reasoning of the original TRO. The merits analysis failed to cite binding authority after 2000. It asserted that H.B. 1193 constitutes viewpoint discrimination, without offering any analysis of a state government’s authority to regulate its own speech. And the document did not fix all of the errors: at Fifth Circuit argument, it was revealed that the doctored TRO cited to “Cousins v. School Bd. of City of Norfolk, 503 F.2d 422, 426–27 (4th Cir. 1974).” That case does not exist; it appears to be an AI hallucination….
Judge Catharina Haynes did not join these portions of the opinion.
There is also some notable First Amendment analysis in the case, which I may discuss in a separate post later today. (I’m occupied for the next several hours.) Thanks to @WillChamberlain and Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) for the pointer.
Anthony M. Shults, Justin Lee Matheny, Rex Morris Shannon, III, and Scott G. Stewart represent defendants.
