In Louisiana, justices of the peace are locally elected part-time judges who perform weddings and handle small claims, wage garnishments and, frequently, evictions. They often hold court in ad hoc rooms around the state and, under state law, they are allowed to accept hearsay evidence. And importantly, for renters facing eviction across Louisiana, justices of the peace get to keep, as personal income, a portion of the money the court collects in fees.
Everyone who files a case in a justice of the peace court pays court fees. The judges then use the income from fees to run the court, pay constables and cover expenses. Whatever is left, the judge keeps as pay and reports on their annual financial statements.
At the start of this reporting project, the Guardian had questions about how these courts operate: How much have the judges collected in fees? How much are they paying themselves? How many evictions are the highest-paid judges handling?
Justices turn in sworn financial statements to the Louisiana legislative auditor, but the state does not put the data into any analyzable form. There are also no computerized records available to monitor what these courts are doing. Uncovering how this system operates took multiple different reporting projects, using a combination of software engineering, manual document processing, and a team of volunteers to process thousands of handwritten financial statements and more than 11,000 pages of court records.
After more than nine months of reporting, we uncovered a system that collects millions of dollars a year in court fees, much of it from poor tenants facing eviction, and a handful of judges who are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars from the fees they are collecting. In the highest-volume, highest-earning court, we found a judge earning between $150,000 and $400,000 a year, overseeing a district with an eviction filing rate that is nearly three times the national average. The only way that judges are required to report the fees they are collecting is by submitting annual financial statements to the Louisiana legislative auditor.
The statements are public records, and courts that earn more than $200,000 a year are required to report their earnings through a certified public accountant. The majority of the courts in the state, however, disclose their earnings through handwritten financial statements. The Guardian digitized a decade’s worth of financial documents – covering roughly 3,400 sworn financial statements from 2016 to 2025 – to discover how much the justice of the peace system brings in and how much the judges are earning through fee income.
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