Michael Marsiglia speaking at a campaign event

From the campaign

What Does Justice Look Like in Practice?

Impartiality, hearing both sides, following the law and treating people with dignity. What those principles look like in an ordinary parish courtroom.

In an ordinary parish courtroom, justice is mostly procedural: the same preparation for every matter, both sides genuinely heard, the law applied as written, and every person treated with the same dignity regardless of what brought them in.

The word does a lot of work

Justice is a large word and campaigns tend to use it as decoration. In a parish court the word is smaller than that and more practical, and it shows up in how a morning is run.

Four principles do most of the work. They are unglamorous, and every one of them is visible to anybody sitting in the room.

Impartiality

Everyone has opinions. Impartiality is the discipline of not letting them decide a matter that the law and the facts should decide.

In practice it looks like this: the same standard applied to a person who is well-spoken and a person who is not; no advantage to the party who has a lawyer over the party who does not; and no assumption carried from the last matter into this one.

It also means a judge who has formed a view before hearing the evidence has already failed, however well-intentioned that view was. This is why candidates for judicial office cannot promise how they would rule. A promise made before the facts is the opposite of impartiality, and offering one would be a reason to distrust the person offering it.

Hearing both sides

Everyone accepts this in principle. Hearing both sides is harder in a busy courtroom than it sounds, because by the time the second account begins, a listener has usually formed a picture.

Hearing both sides properly means the second account gets the same attention as the first, even when the first was persuasive. It means letting someone finish. It means asking the question that would test your own initial reading rather than the one that confirms it.

People can tell the difference. A person who was heard and lost usually leaves less aggrieved than a person who won but felt talked over.

Following the law

A judge does not write the statute and does not choose which cases arrive. The law decides the outcome and the judge applies it to the facts actually in front of the court.

Following the law has an uncomfortable consequence: the correct result is sometimes not the result anyone in the room wanted. Following the law means reaching it anyway, and explaining why, rather than bending the rule to reach a kinder answer.

A court that bends the rule for a sympathetic person has to bend it for the next person too, or admit it is not applying a rule at all.

Dignity

A person in a parish courtroom may have no lawyer. They may never have been in a courtroom before. They may be worried about something attached to the case rather than the case itself.

Dignity in that setting is ordinary courtesy applied consistently. Names pronounced properly. Plain explanation instead of vocabulary. Patience with someone who is nervous, on the fortieth matter of the day as much as the first. An answer when someone asks what just happened.

Dignity costs the court nothing. It changes the experience entirely, and it is the part people remember.

When one side has no lawyer

In Michael’s eleven years on this court’s docket, most of the people who appeared did so without a lawyer. That single fact reshapes what each of the four principles above actually requires.

Impartiality between two represented parties is largely a matter of favoring neither. Impartiality where one side has counsel and the other has a folder asks for something more demanding: holding an identical standard while recognizing that only one of them can present a case in the form the court is built to receive.

Hearing both sides is straightforward when both sides know what is legally relevant, and harder when one of them leads with the part that matters most to them personally, which is frequently not the part that matters to the statute.

Following the law is unchanged by representation. The statute applies identically either way. Explaining the result, though, stops being optional when the person on the receiving end has nobody to explain it to them afterwards.

Dignity costs the court nothing in either case, which is exactly why its absence is so visible when it happens.

What this court actually has power over

Principles are easier to weigh against a real jurisdiction, and this one is narrow and specific.

Louisiana Revised Statutes 13:2561.2 gives First Parish Court civil jurisdiction concurrent with the district court, inside its own territory, up to a ceiling the statute places on the amount in dispute or the value of the property involved, exclusive of interest, costs and attorney fees. The legislature raised that ceiling in 2026.

The same statute does something less obvious and worth knowing about. Where a reconventional demand, an intervention or a third-party opposition connected to the main case exceeds the ceiling, the court is divested of jurisdiction over the main demand and every incidental one, and the case is removed to the Twenty-Fourth Judicial District Court. A dispute can begin here and finish somewhere else, through no choice of either party.

Alongside the civil side, the court hears misdemeanor-level criminal matters, traffic offenses and parish ordinance violations, through separate criminal, civil and traffic departments.

None of that is discretionary. A judge who wishes the court could hear something larger has no power to make it so, and a judge who would prefer to keep a case that has outgrown the ceiling has no power to do that either. Justice in practice begins with knowing precisely where those edges sit.

Efficiency belongs on this list too

Fairness and efficiency are often described as competing values, with speed traded against care. In a parish court that framing is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that costs people money.

A docket that runs late is not a neutral inconvenience. Someone who took unpaid leave to attend has already paid a real price before anything is decided. A hearing that does not go ahead costs them a second day, and sometimes a third. For a person working an hourly job, that is the most expensive part of the whole matter.

So a well-run courtroom is not the enemy of a fair one. Starting on time, scheduling realistically, and treating a continuance as something with a cost attached are all part of treating people properly. The two are the same job.

What efficiency must never mean is cutting someone off. Speed achieved by not letting a person finish is not efficiency; it is the appearance of it, paid for by the one thing the court owes them.

The justice most people never see a judge deliver

One part of this court’s work happens with no judge in the room at all.

Under Louisiana Revised Statutes 13:2561.8 the judge of this court fixes a schedule of fines, including costs, for the various traffic offenses. A person charged with such an offense may plead guilty before the clerk, who records it, and pay the fine and costs that schedule sets.

For anyone who resolves a citation that way, that is the entire encounter. No hearing, no argument, no judge. A figure on a schedule, applied at a counter.

Which makes the schedule itself an act of judgment, and a consequential one. Set it high and an ordinary citation becomes a real hardship for somebody working an hourly job. Set it without thought and it lands unevenly across people whose circumstances differ enormously.

The fine schedule is among the least visible things a parish court judge does, and it operates entirely outside the courtroom. A candidate who discusses fairness without acknowledging it has described only the part of the job that happens in public.

How a resident can tell

None of this has to be taken on faith by somebody sitting in the room. Most of it is observable.

Does the court start when it said it would. Does the judge appear to have read the file before the matter was called, or during it. Is a person allowed to finish. When someone plainly has not understood, does the explanation arrive without their having to ask twice.

Is the manner the same for the person in a suit and the person who came straight from a shift. Is a difficult litigant handled with the courtesy extended to a compliant one.

Those are the visible indicators, and any resident can watch a morning of parish court and form a view. The court’s hours are published and its proceedings are open.

Why it matters more here than almost anywhere

First Parish Court hears the everyday matters that bring people into a courtroom who have no other reason to be in one. For someone in that position, whatever happens in the room becomes what they believe about the justice system, formed from a single morning.

A court that runs on time, explains itself, and treats people the same way regardless of who they are produces citizens who believe the system works. A court that does not produces the opposite, and the belief outlasts the case by decades.

Questions people ask

Why will a judicial candidate not say how they would rule?

Because a commitment made before hearing the facts is the opposite of impartiality. A candidate can describe method: preparation, how the docket is run, and how people are treated.