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- U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate placed an indefinite injunction against HB 1193 last year. His use of AI to draft the order, and the inaccuracies contained therein, raised concerns all the way up to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans heard arguments Monday over an indefinite injunction placed on Mississippi’s anti-DEI law by U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate.
The law, HB 1193, was passed by the Mississippi Legislature during the 2025 legislative session and then signed into law by Governor Tate Reeves (R).
As it was described by lawmakers, the law prevents public K-12 schools and higher education institutions in Mississippi from utilizing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices when making decisions concerning school employment, academic opportunities, and student engagement. Such decisions are to be based on an individual’s merit and qualifications rather than a person’s race, color, sexual orientation, or gender. The law passed through both bodies in the State Capitol and then received the governor’s signature in April.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Mississippi Center for Justice filed the lawsuit after the bill became law.
On Monday, counsel with the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office argued before the Court of Appeals that the provisions outlined in HB 1193 should be removed from the preliminary injunction that was put in place by Judge Wingate in August of last year.
Anthony Shults, representing the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office, asked the court to consider vacating the injunction due to claims that the lower court ignoring the analysis requirements for facial claims and it “misconstrued the state’s law and applied incorrect legal principals.”
The option of reassigning the case to a different judge other than Wingate was supported by the Attorney General’s office.
“The state believes that reassigning this case to a different judge on remand would be appropriate,” Shults said.
Issues with the case, Shults said, include the use of artificial intelligence to write the opinion that issued the temporary restraining order handed down by Judge Wingate. That AI-created draft was later found to have inaccuracies pertaining to the actual language of the bill and incorrectly listed plaintiff names, requiring a rewrite.
“The problem was it referred to those errors as merely clerical and did not give any explanation or response to the state’s motion requesting, I believe legitimately, an explanation,” Shults described.
Judge Wingate admitted to the mistake in using AI to draft the order after U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley wrote a letter to him regarding the allegations. Judge Wingate then sent a letter to Robert Conrad, Director of the Administrative Office of the Courts, in response to Senator Grassley, stating that a law clerk utilized a generative artificial intelligence tool known as Perplexity “strictly as a foundational drafting assistant to synthesize publicly available information on the docket.”
READ MORE: Judge Wingate admits mistake in use of AI in drafting order blocking Mississippi’s anti-DEI law
“The law clerk who used GenAI in this case did not input any sealed, privileged, confidential, or otherwise non-public case information,” Wingate wrote. “The standard practice in my chambers is for every draft opinion to undergo several levels of review before becoming final and being docketed, including the use of cite checking tools. In this case, however, the opinion that was docketed on July 20, 2025, was an early draft that had not gone through the standard review process. It was a draft that should have never been docketed. This was a mistake.”
Wingate went on to say that he has taken steps to ensure the mistake will not happen again.
Shults went on to contest the arguments made by the plaintiffs that claim implementation of the bill infringes on a student’s First Amendment rights.
“The text of the statute made clear the law does not itself regulate individual students,” Shults argued. “It applies to institutions. It regulates things like class programming, hiring, contracting, [things] that students have no power, ability or authority to do.”
Rob McDuff, the attorney representing the Mississippi Center for Justice and other plaintiffs, said he disagrees with Shults that the bill does not infringe on free speech. To him, allowing the bill to take effect would negatively affect the typical lessons provided in history, literature and biology classes. He argued that the vague nature of the bill’s wording is of concern, ultimately requesting that the court leave the injunction in place.
“We have real issues here that have been raised by the brief,” McDuff said. “What does ‘engagement’ mean? Does it really mean you can not discuss issues related to race, sex, color, gender, identity, sexual orientation and national origin even though some of those issues have been part of classes for years, some for decades?”
To McDuff, the nature of the wording in the law will lead to chaos in the state’s public schools and universities as the leadership in each district and university attempts to navigate the “vague and overreaching” statute, essentially impacting every student’s First Amendment rights.
“This is really going to impact student speech in the classroom and outside of the classroom,” McDuff added. “Student speech is not government speech. It is clearly protected by the First Amendment.”
He used the example of class instruction on the Civil War, which includes facts surrounding slavery, sex and race. Reversing the injunction, McDuff said, will create an environment where students become uncomfortable speaking out.
“It is a cascading effect of First Amendment harm because it’s not just any case, we’re dealing with a vagueness case. It deals with freedom of speech and the freedom of students to talk about issues that they’ve been talking about for years in Mississippi school and will continue to talk about in the other 49 states,” McDuff argued.
When asked by the judicial panel if the inaccuracies in the initial AI drafted opinion are an issue in how the case was handled, McDuff said that since the decision to issue the injunction was made by Judge Wingate before the AI draft was written, he argued it should not be a factor.
In his rebuttal, Shults said the bill would not affect a student’s First Amendment rights, since the focus of HB 1193 was to ensure state employees are treated fairly based on merit, performance and character, not on their sex, race or other physically identifiable characteristics.
A decision on the matter is expected to take several weeks.
Jeremy Pittari
