Michael Marsiglia speaking at a campaign event

From the campaign

Jefferson Parish Is Home

Michael Marsiglia has practiced, taught, coached and volunteered on the East Bank for two decades. Why the parish is not a jurisdiction to him but a place he lives.

Michael Marsiglia has spent two decades practicing law in Jefferson Parish, and he and his wife Jennifer are raising their three sons here. The parish is where the school run happens.

The difference between serving a place and living in it

Plenty of lawyers work in a parish they do not live in. The court is an address, the county line is a boundary on a map, and the drive home leads somewhere else.

Michael’s working life and his ordinary life happen in the same square miles. The courthouse is fifteen minutes from the places his family does its shopping. Some of the people who have stood in that courtroom are people he passes at a hardware store.

It changes the stakes in a way that is difficult to manufacture. A judge who lives elsewhere can treat a bad morning in court as a professional matter. A judge who lives here cannot, because the consequences do not stay at work.

Family first, and briefly

Michael has been married for twenty years to his wife, Jennifer. They are raising their three sons in Jefferson Parish, along with three adopted dogs who were not consulted about the arrangement.

He is a lifelong outdoorsman, and describes what that has taught him in terms of patience, discipline, and respect for tradition. Those are what somebody says when they have spent a lot of early mornings waiting for something that may not happen.

Twenty years of the parish’s legal work

Michael has acted for private individuals and businesses across the parish, and also for its institutions. He has been counsel to the Parish of Jefferson, to the Jefferson Parish Clerk of Court, and to the Jefferson Parish School Board, as well as to the State of Louisiana, the City of Gretna and the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry.

He served as Special Counsel for Jefferson Parish in the nationwide opioid litigation.

Representing a parish is a particular kind of work. The client is the whole parish, including the people who would have preferred a different decision.

Eleven years in the building

For eleven years Michael served as a Traffic Hearing Officer at First Parish Court, which sits at 924 David Drive in Metairie, and oversaw roughly 25,000 docketed matters.

Twenty-five thousand matters is a great many mornings watching residents of this parish walk into a courtroom for the first time in their lives, usually holding a ticket, usually without a lawyer, usually nervous.

That is a specific kind of local knowledge, built from sitting in the room where a lot of people met the court for the first time.

Teaching the next set

For years Michael has coached the mock trial team at Haynes Academy for Advanced Studies, a Jefferson Parish public school. He teaches negotiation and advocacy to law students as adjunct faculty at Tulane University School of Law.

Coaching teenagers is good practice for a courtroom. They ask why, they will not accept the professional version of the answer, and every explanation has to work first time.

He coaches youth sports at our local playgrounds as well, which is less about sport than about turning up every week for people who are counting on it.

What the East Bank actually is, for court purposes

The parish is split by the river, and for this court the split is not a figure of speech. Louisiana Revised Statutes 13:2561.1 defines First Parish Court’s territory as Wards 7, 8, 9 and 10 of Jefferson Parish, being all of the territory lying east of the Mississippi River.

That is Metairie, Kenner, Harahan, River Ridge, Jefferson and Elmwood. A few hundred thousand people who mostly have no reason to think about which side of a river their citation was written on, right up until it matters.

It is a mixed place, and the docket reflects that. On any given morning the room holds people from very different circumstances with very different amounts of experience of institutions, all of them subject to the same law and entitled to the same treatment.

What this does and does not mean

Living somewhere is not a qualification for judicial office. Qualifications are education, admission, and time actually spent in a courtroom, and those are set out on the Experience page.

What local roots do supply is stake. A judge who lives in the parish carries the results of the court’s work into his own community, and meets them at school pickup rather than reading about them.

Voters can weigh that for what it is worth. It is offered as context rather than as a credential, and context is genuinely useful in a race where most people have very little to go on.

Questions people ask

Does Michael Marsiglia live in Jefferson Parish?

Yes. He and his wife Jennifer are raising their three sons in the parish, and he has practiced law here for two decades.

Which court has he worked in?

First Parish Court, at 924 David Drive in Metairie, where he served as a Traffic Hearing Officer for eleven years.