Michael Marsiglia speaking at a campaign event

From the campaign

Understanding Fairness in the Courtroom

What fairness means in a parish courtroom: the same law, the same preparation and the same chance to be heard, and why no candidate can promise an outcome.

Fairness in a courtroom is a question about process. A court can promise the same law, the same preparation, and the same chance to be heard for every person who comes before it. What it cannot promise is a result that satisfies both sides.

A candidate for judicial office can commit to the method. No candidate can commit to outcomes.

Most of what people experience as unfairness is procedural: not following what happened or not being able to take part.

The real test of consistency comes late in a long docket, not at the start of it.

First Parish Court hears smaller civil disputes under Louisiana Revised Statutes 13:2561.2 and runs criminal, civil, and traffic departments.

The word gets used two ways

In ordinary speech, fairness usually means the outcome a person believes they deserved. In a courtroom it means something narrower and more testable: whether the process that produced the outcome treated everyone the same way.

The two come apart constantly. In almost every contested matter, one side leaves without what they came for. A court that produces a disappointed party is working normally.

So a voter assessing a judicial candidate is really assessing the process half of the word. The other half was never in anyone’s gift.

What a fair process actually contains

Four things, none of them dramatic.

The same law applied to everyone. A statute does not soften for a sympathetic party or harden for an unfamiliar one.

The same preparation for every matter. A file read before the hearing rather than during it, whether the matter is a civil dispute or the price of a citation.

The same chance to be heard. Time to finish an account and a plain question when something does not make sense.

The same explanation afterwards. A person who understands why something happened stands in a different position from one who does not, whatever the ruling was.

Where people actually experience unfairness

Rarely in the ruling. Mostly in everything around it.

Someone who could not follow what was being said. Someone who was never told they were allowed to speak. Someone who took unpaid leave, waited a morning, and went home without understanding why.

Each of those is a failure of process with nothing to do with the merits of the case. Each of them also sits squarely inside a judge’s control.

The test is repetition

Any court is fair at nine in the morning on the first matter. The difficulty arrives later.

By the fortieth matter of a long docket, accounts begin to sound alike, patience thins, and the quickest route through the room becomes tempting. Fairness that holds at that hour is a working discipline. Fairness that holds only at the start is a mood.

This is why consistency has to be built as a habit and maintained deliberately. A court that treats it as a quality it already possesses will lose it late in the morning and will not notice.

What fairness cannot mean

It cannot mean deciding a case before hearing it, however sympathetic the person in front of the court.

A court that bends a rule for one party has to bend it for the next or admit it is applying something other than a rule. The pressure to do it is real, and resisting it is part of the job.

It also cannot mean a promise. A candidate for judicial office cannot say how he would decide a case, a category of case, or a class of party. Anyone who does has told you something about himself and nothing reliable about the law.

Michael on the practice

Eleven years as a Traffic Hearing Officer at First Parish Court and more than three hundred court-appointed mediations add up to a long time spent on the process of half of this world.

Mediation makes the point most clearly. No ruling is available to fall back on. The only thing that moves two people toward an agreement is each of them believing the process was straight, which means the process has to actually be straight.

That is the commitment Michael would bring to Division A. It concerns method, and method is the only thing a candidate for judicial office can honestly offer.

Questions people ask

Is a fair judge one who rules in my favor?

No. Fairness describes how the matter was handled: the same law, the same preparation, and the same chance to be heard. In most contested matters, one side leaves without what they wanted.

Can a judicial candidate promise to be fair to a particular group?

No. A commitment about how a case would be decided is the opposite of impartiality. A candidate can speak to method and to nothing beyond it.

What can I do if I do not understand what happened in court?

Ask for it in plain words. That is a reasonable request. For anything about a specific matter, the Clerk of Court can tell you what is on the record, and a lawyer can advise on your situation.