After You Sign
Last October, I wrote about a federal judge in Mississippi whose chambers had used artificial intelligence in preparing an order containing fabricated facts and legal authorities. I called it our Avianca moment.
Just over a year later, the case is back in the news. On October 22, 2026, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued its opinion in Jackson Federation of Teachers v. Fitch, vacating the district court’s preliminary injunction and ordering the case reassigned to a different judge.
The case involved a challenge to a Mississippi law addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion in public education. The district judge had issued a temporary restraining order containing numerous factual assertions that were not supported by the record. The order identified individuals and organizations that were not parties, referenced declarations that were nowhere to be found, and misquoted the statute. After the errors were brought to the court’s attention, the judge replaced the order and later acknowledged that a law clerk had used AI in preparing an earlier draft. But even the corrected order cited a nonexistent case, an error uncovered during oral argument before the Fifth Circuit.
The appellate court also identified substantial errors in the district court’s legal analysis. It was especially critical of the judge’s decision to remove the fabricated information without explaining why his original ruling remained justified without it. The court found the broader problems with the proceedings significant enough to warrant reassignment, an extraordinary remedy.
I have written before about the higher stakes of AI misuse in the judiciary and the potential consequences for public confidence in our courts. More recently, in “Before You Sign,” I discussed a Georgia Supreme Court decision vacating an order containing fabricated citations that had been prepared by a prosecutor and signed by a trial judge.
In Georgia, the problematic drafting came from outside chambers. In Mississippi, it came from within. But once a judge signs an order, it becomes the court’s voice, regardless of who drafted it. And when errors are discovered afterward, simply correcting the document may not be enough to resolve what happened.
Another federal court recently considered a different side of judicial responsibility involving AI. In August, a federal district court in Nevada dismissed Phillips v. Parlade. The plaintiff alleged that the state judge presiding over his case had delegated all of her decision-making to AI. He argued that her complete reliance on AI meant her ruling was no longer a judicial act entitled to immunity. The federal court did not determine whether that allegation was true. Instead, it held that issuing a judicial ruling remained a judicial act protected by judicial immunity, even under the circumstances alleged.
As generative AI becomes part of judicial work, these two decisions reveal an important distinction. Judicial immunity may protect a judge from personal civil liability even when a litigant alleges that AI performed all of the decision-making. But it does not shield the resulting order from appellate review. A judge may be protected personally while an order is vacated, the case is reassigned, and the public is left wondering what happened inside chambers.
I hope none of this discourages judges from exploring AI though. I remain genuinely excited about what this technology could mean for our courts. I believe it can help us work more efficiently, reduce the time we spend on routine tasks, and allow us to devote more attention to the people and cases before us. But the problem in Mississippi was not simply that someone in chambers used AI. It was that fabricated information made its way into a judicial order, and even the effort to correct it failed to catch everything.
That is why developing competence matters. We need to understand what these tools do well, where they can mislead us, and how to verify the work they produce before relying on them in our judicial work. We cannot gain that understanding by standing on the sidelines. We have to start small, experiment, and build experience. As I have said many times, it is not our job to be first. It is our job to get it right. But we must begin.
And perhaps that brings us back to where we started. Before we sign, the responsibility is ours to make sure the order is correct. After we sign, the order speaks for the court, regardless of whether the words originated with a lawyer, a law clerk, or a chatbot.
Immunity may protect the judge. It does not protect the judgment.
