Appeals court lets Mississippi DEI ban take effect after judge's AI-riddled ruling vacated

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has vacated a lower court's injunction against Mississippi's anti-DEI law, ruling that the original decision was riddled with fabricated facts, phantom quotations and legal analysis the panel called "a botch job." Mississippi may now enforce H.B. 1193 while challenges continue.

Judge Henry Wingate had issued a temporary restraining order blocking the law, which bars K-12 schools, community colleges and public universities from maintaining DEI offices, mandating diversity training, or teaching certain "divisive concepts" on race, sex and gender identity — with state funding at risk for violators. On October 22, the Fifth Circuit found that Wingate's order contained factual assertions appearing nowhere in the record: plaintiffs and defendants not listed in the complaint, "declarations" from individuals who do not exist or were never present, false quotations attributed to the text of the bill, and claims that the law had already killed off programs that appear to be fictitious.

The panel attributed the fabrications to the judge's use of AI, and found his decision rested on "impoverished legal analysis" that failed to address controlling Supreme Court and Fifth Circuit precedent, manipulating "the words of statutes and cases without regard to the texts' meaning as a whole." The case has been reassigned to a different judge.

The substantive question — whether Mississippi can condition school funding on the absence of DEI offices — remains undecided. What the ruling settles is narrower and more uncomfortable: a federal district judge submitted an order containing invented parties and quotations, and it took an appellate panel to notice.

The Fifth Circuit caught this one. The next fabrication may come from a chamber where no one is reading the record at all.