Michael Marsiglia speaking at a campaign event

From the campaign

The Role of Trust in the Judicial System

Why courts depend on public trust, how a parish courtroom builds or spends it, and why explaining a decision matters more than the ruling itself.

Courts have no way to compel belief in their own authority. Almost everything they do depends on people accepting decisions they disagree with, and that acceptance rests on trust built one ordinary morning at a time.

Why a court needs it at all

A court can enforce its orders, and it has means of doing so. Enforcement is slow and costly, though, and it is reserved for the minority of matters that need it. Most of what a court does relies on people accepting an outcome they did not want and complying without being compelled.

That acceptance is neither automatic nor free. Compliance rests on a broad public assumption that the system is straight, and an assumption of that size has to be built somewhere.

What a court can compel, and what it cannot

The distinction matters, because it shows where trust is actually carrying the weight.

A court can enforce a judgment, and it has means of doing so. Failing to appear when required carries consequences of its own, separate from whatever the original matter concerned.

What a court cannot do is make enforcement the normal case. Enforcement is slow, costly, and available for only a small fraction of the matters moving through a busy docket. If a meaningful share of people simply declined to appear, declined to pay and declined to comply, the machinery would not cope.

The machinery copes because most people turn up and comply, largely without being made to. That willingness is the load-bearing element in the whole structure, and nothing in the statute creates it.

It gets built locally

A person’s view of the justice system can be formed from a single encounter, in the smallest court they will ever visit. For someone whose only contact with the courts is a citation, an appellate opinion plays no part in it.

A parish court is where that happens, handling ordinary matters for ordinary people: a citation, a security deposit, a disagreement with a contractor. Under Louisiana Revised Statutes 13:2561.2 the civil side runs to a modest ceiling, which covers a great deal of ordinary life without ever being large enough to make the news.

The scale is exactly why it matters. The court that almost nobody writes about is the one that almost everybody meets.

Where this court is met without a hearing

For anyone who resolves a traffic matter that way, the encounter with First Parish Court is not a hearing at all.

Under Louisiana Revised Statutes 13:2561.8 the judge fixes a schedule of fines for traffic offenses, and a person charged with one may plead guilty before the clerk and pay the amount that schedule sets. No courtroom, no argument, no judge.

What that person forms an impression of is the fairness of a figure, the manner of the clerk who took it, and the length of the queue. Those are the working components of public trust for everyone who resolves a matter that way, and a judge shapes all three without meeting any of them.

How it is built

Slowly, and out of unremarkable material.

Starting on time. Explaining what is happening in words a person can follow. Extending the same courtesy to someone whose manner is difficult. Pronouncing a name properly, and asking when it is unfamiliar.

Any one of those passes without comment. Repeated across a docket, and then across a year, they become a reputation, and that reputation is what our neighbors mean when they say a court is fair.

How it is lost

Faster, and out of less.

One person treated visibly differently from the person before them. One explanation given to somebody who asked and withheld from somebody who did not know they could. One morning where the room is plainly in a hurry.

People read those signals quickly and remember them for a long time. They also talk. A single account of being dismissed travels further than a hundred uneventful mornings, because an uneventful morning gives nobody anything to repeat.

Explanation does more work than outcome

Anyone who has spent time in a courtroom recognizes the pattern. What people carry away depends heavily on whether they understood what happened to them.

Someone who lost and understands why has been treated as a participant in their own matter. Someone who won and never followed the proceeding was a spectator at it.

Trust follows the first of those, and it follows it even where the ruling went the other way.

Trust is not the same as popularity

The two get confused, and a candidate for judicial office has good reason to keep them apart.

A court that gave everybody what they wanted would be popular and would not be trusted, because the second time a person appeared they would understand that the outcome turned on mood rather than on rule. Predictability is the thing being trusted. A predictable court can be disagreed with and relied on at the same time.

The same distinction is why trust cannot be campaigned into existence. A candidate can describe the method they would use and point to a record of having used it. The trust itself gets built afterwards, through conduct, over a stretch of time considerably longer than an election.

The cost of losing it

A courtroom that has lost the room’s confidence does not stop working. The room simply works worse, in ways no docket statistic records.

People who expect to be dismissed arrive defensive, and a defensive account takes longer to hear. People who believe the process is arbitrary are less likely to appear at all, which generates enforcement work that need not have existed. People who felt mistreated repeat the story, and the next person arrives having already heard it.

A reversed decision or a formal complaint would at least leave a record. This leaves none. The damage shows up as a court that is harder to run and a population less willing to use it, and by the time either is obvious the cause lies years back.

What a court cannot do about it

A court cannot ask for trust. Claiming to deserve it tends to produce the opposite effect.

Nor can a court buy trust with a lenient decision. A court that softens a rule to please the room has traded something durable for something temporary, and the next party to meet the unbent rule will notice the difference.

The only route available is behaving consistently for long enough that the consistency becomes the expectation.

Why this court carries more of it than its size suggests

First Parish Court handles matters that are modest in legal terms and substantial in personal ones. A citation attached to a license that is attached to a job. A security deposit that represents a month of rent. A contractor dispute that is a roof.

The people bringing those matters mostly have no other contact with the justice system. They have no basis for comparison, nobody interpreting the experience for them afterwards, and no reason to suppose the courtroom they stood in was unrepresentative of the rest.

So the impression formed here is not one data point among many in a person’s view of the courts. For someone in that position it is the whole of it.

Michael on the practice

Eleven years as a Traffic Hearing Officer at First Parish Court is a long stretch in the part of the building where public trust is actually made or spent. Roughly twenty-five thousand docketed matters is a great many opportunities to do it either way.

More than three hundred court-appointed mediations make a related point. Mediation works only where both sides believe the process is straight, because there is no ruling to fall back on. Trust is the entire mechanism.

That is what Michael would carry into Division A. The commitment concerns how the room is run, which is the only thing a candidate for judicial office can honestly promise.

Questions people ask

What builds trust in a courtroom day to day?

Punctuality, plain explanation, consistent courtesy, and the same standard applied to everyone regardless of how they speak or whether they have a lawyer.