A couple of weeks ago, a federal court in Mississippi issued a temporary restraining order that quickly became the talk of legal circles. U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate signed the order, which paused enforcement of key sections of House Bill 1193. This was a controversial new law restricting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in Mississippi’s public schools and universities. Now, if you’ve been following the news, you’ll know that DEI programs are more controversial than ever, with the second Trump Administration putting DEI in their crosshairs. So it’s not surprising that this order has been stirring up a lot of drama in the legal community.
But it’s actually not for the reasons you’d think. It was neither the outcome nor the legal reasoning in the order that drew attention. Instead, it was what appeared to be a judicial document gone off the rails — in a way that is highly typical of artificial intelligence.
Order Raises Red Flags
You don’t have to read very far into Judge Wingate’s order to smell something off. In its very first footnote, the document listed an array of plaintiffs, including the Mississippi Library Association and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc.
The problem? None of these organizations had ever been parties to the lawsuit. The order also named officials such as the “Commissioner of Higher Education” and “State Superintendent of Education” as defendants, even though neither had been sued in those capacities. And these weren’t some minor typos, either; they were indisputable errors.
You might be able to argue that such mistakes don’t really affect the outcome of the legal analysis, but it wasn’t just the procedural stuff that the order got wrong. It also got the law at issue wrong.
Misquoted Statute
The order repeatedly referenced terms such as “race or sex stereotyping,” “race or sex scapegoating,” and “critical race theory,” placing these phrases in quotation marks as if they were direct quotes from HB 1193. This created the impression that these specific concepts were expressly defined or prohibited by the statute.
However, as soon pointed out by the defendants, none of these phrases appear anywhere in the law itself. The statute does not use these terms or phrases even once. Instead, HB 1193 uses broader language about “divisive concepts.” The law restricts certain types of DEI programming, but it does not define those restrictions using the quoted phrases.
This is not a “no harm, no foul” situation. In legal writing, this kind of misquotation can mislead about what the law actually says and how it operates. By attributing these particular phrases to HB 1193, the order suggested that Mississippi’s law was targeting specific ideas (like “critical race theory”—when in fact the legislature did not use that term. This could affect both public understanding of what is being challenged in court and the legal analysis regarding vagueness or overbreadth.
Misinformation from the Record
The problems didn’t stop there. Judge Wingate’s order referenced the “cessation of DEI offices and initiatives at Jackson State University, Alcorn State University, and Hinds Community College” and “cancellation of implicit bias and Safe Zone training.” It cited the plaintiff’s complaint as the source of these allegations.
The problem, of course, is that the plaintiffs never made any such allegations. When attorneys and court observers checked the actual filings, they found that neither the complaint nor any supporting evidence mentioned these events. In other words, there was no claim or documentation submitted by the plaintiffs stating that those universities had already shut down their DEI offices or canceled those particular trainings.
This is significant because a court order is supposed to rely on facts presented in the legal filings and evidence before it. By referencing events that were not alleged by either party, the order introduced factual inaccuracies into the official record—errors that could affect both the legal analysis and public understanding of what was actually at stake in the case.
Fake Citation
One of the more puzzling aspects of Judge Wingate’s original temporary restraining order was his reference to a case called “Cousins v. School Board of City of Norfolk,” supposedly decided by the Fourth Circuit in 1974.
When attorneys involved in the litigation searched legal databases for Cousins v. School Board of City of Norfolk from 1974, nothing turned up — not even a remotely similar case with that citation or party configuration. The absence was not just a matter of a misspelled name or an incorrect year; the case simply did not exist in the record of published federal appellate decisions. This kind of error is highly unusual for a federal judge’s order, all the more so because their judicial clerks are supposed to double-check every citation before an order is issued.
Fabricated Evidence
Perhaps the most egregious error was the use of supposed evidence that simply wasn’t there. The order cited sworn declarations from four individuals (Brandy Williams, Leslie-Burl McLemore, Dr. Rhea Bishop, and Natalie Collier) as key support for the court’s findings. It even pointed to specific exhibit numbers in the case record (for example, “Declaration of Brandy Williams, Doc. 11-1”) as if these documents were filed and available for review.
But when attorneys and observers checked the actual court filings, they discovered a different reality. The exhibits that Judge Wingate referenced did exist, but they contained declarations from entirely different people. For instance, the document labeled as “Doc. 11-1” was not a statement from Brandy Williams, but rather from someone else altogether (such as Carmen Dunn). The same pattern held true for the other three names. The cited exhibit numbers for McLemore, Bishop, and Collier instead corresponded to declarations by completely different people: Barbara Phillips, D’Andra Orey, and Cliff Johnson.
So who are Williams, McLemore, Bishop, and Collier? We don’t know. There were no declarations anywhere in the record from any of them. These individuals’ statements simply did not exist in any of the filings submitted to the court in this case. If you think this is alarming, you’re right. Judges are required to base their findings on the record before them. But in this case, factual claims in the order were supposedly supported by evidence that was never actually presented to the court.
AI Fingerprints All Over
All the errors were so unusual that it was difficult to explain any of them as a simple oversight or typo. In today’s AI-driven world, this all raised suspicions among attorneys.
The talk quickly became that some kind of automated drafting tool, possibly artificial intelligence, could have generated plausible-sounding but entirely fictitious citations. Among them was Christina Frohock, a professor at the University of Miami who studies AI’s impact on law. She noted that many of these mistakes resembled so-called “hallucinations” by AI programs: citations to cases that don’t exist, fabricated quotes, and invented facts
And among both parties to the lawsuit, alarm bells quickly started going off. Just two days after the order was entered, lawyers for Mississippi’s Attorney General filed an unopposed motion to clarify or correct the order. They laid out each factual misstep in painstaking detail. Their filing stopped short of accusing anyone outright but made clear that such mistakes were unprecedented.
“Our attorneys have never seen anything like this,” an official from the Attorney General’s Office told Mississippi Today.
Judge Remains Silent
After defense attorneys flagged these problems, on July 23, Judge Wingate quietly replaced his original order with a corrected version. The new order scrubbed many of the errors but was backdated to July 20—the date of the original filing—leaving no public trace of the initial document on the court docket.
Despite repeated inquiries from journalists, Judge Wingate declined to comment on whether he or his staff had used artificial intelligence in drafting either version of the TRO. This highlights a blind spot in legal ethics. As Professor Frohock observed: “If an attorney does this, a judge can demand explanations, but it’s not true in the other direction. We will probably never know what happened, unless an appellate court demands it.”
Related Resources:
- Fake AI-Generated Cases Make It Past Divorce Judge (FindLaw's Practice of Law)
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- Haven't Started Using AI Yet? You Aren't as Behind as You Might Think. (FindLaw's Practice of Law)
