The Fifth Circuit has yanked a Mississippi anti-DEI case away from a district judge after finding a trail of serious mistakes, sloppy reasoning, and what one appellate judge called a “botch job.” The rebuke centered on a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction that were packed with factual errors, shaky legal analysis, and even a citation the court said looked like an AI hallucination.
Judge Jerry Smith, writing for the panel, did not hold back. He said the district court “ignored and manipulated governing law” and suggested the mess may have been driven by a “policy agenda” rather than careful judging.
The case started when teachers, parents, and students challenged a Mississippi law that restricts DEI-related practices in public schools and universities. Judge Henry Wingate initially blocked the law, but Mississippi officials quickly flagged major problems in his order, including people listed as plaintiffs who were not actually part of the lawsuit and defendants who were named incorrectly.
The Fifth Circuit said the original order also leaned on claims that did not match the record. According to the panel, the judge relied on declarations from people who did not appear in the case file and described school actions that were not supported by the evidence.
One of the sharpest complaints involved language that the court said was simply not in the statute. The order attributed phrases to the law such as “race or sex stereotyping,” “race or sex scapegoating,” “critical race theory” and “institutional bias,” even though those words were not there.
Smith noted that the original restraining order had even been kept from public view until the defendants attached it to a filing. He said the court was fortunate to have a copy because the document itself showed just how far off track the reasoning had gone.
Things did not improve much after the order was revised. The Fifth Circuit said the corrected version still contained a citation to a nonexistent case, which the panel described as “an apparent AI hallucination,” and said that error cast doubt on the quality of the entire ruling.
Wingate later acknowledged that a law clerk had used artificial intelligence to help draft the temporary restraining order. He called the problems clerical and insisted they did not affect the court’s core legal reasoning, but the Fifth Circuit was not buying it.
The appellate panel said it was hard to see how so many wrong facts could have had no effect on the final judgment. In the court’s view, the errors were not small slips, but signs that the decision-making process itself had gone off the rails.
The legal analysis took its own beating. The Fifth Circuit said Wingate misread key Supreme Court rulings on free speech, especially the 2024 Moody v. NetChoice decision, which sets out when a court can knock out an entire law on First Amendment grounds.
Under that framework, a law can be struck in full only if its unconstitutional applications outweigh the lawful ones by a wide margin. Smith said Wingate seemed to treat that standard as optional, which raised doubts about whether the judge was trying to follow binding precedent in good faith.
The panel also rejected Wingate’s approach to preliminary injunctions. The court said he flipped the usual logic on its head by suggesting that uncertainty and dire consequences were enough to pause the law, when in reality a plaintiff must still satisfy the standard for emergency relief.
That was not the only misstep. The Fifth Circuit said the district court also misread Trump v. CASA, a 2025 Supreme Court decision limiting judges from issuing relief broader than what is needed for the parties in front of them.
Wingate had treated that ruling as support for an all-or-nothing injunction, but Smith said CASA points in the opposite direction. The high court, he wrote, was warning judges to keep relief narrow, targeted, and tied to the actual plaintiffs.
By the end, the appeals court had seen enough. It vacated the injunction and sent the case back to the Southern District of Mississippi, where a new judge will take it from here and sort through the wreckage left behind.
