In the United States, is it possible to be elected or appointed to any court judge positions without a law degree? Are there specific states or jurisdictions where this would be possible? Does it happen with any regularity?
In Georgia all judges must be attorneys. However, it used to be the law that you could become a Probate Court judge or a Magistrate Court judge (small claims court) without a law degree. It was not at all uncommon in the past to find non-lawyers in those positions, particularly in rural jurisdictions. The law was changed so that now even Probate Court and Magistrate Court judges must have law degrees. However, the laws were (I believe) prospective and not retroactive, so we may still have some sitting judges in those courts with no law degrees who were “grandfathered” in.
Don’t know about other states.
In Virginia, you must be a member of the bar - a lawyer - to be a judge. You may be a magistrate, or justice of the peace, without being a lawyer.
However, you do not need a law degree to be a lawyer in Virginia. You may “read for the bar” – that is, take the bar exam – without having a degree.
- Rick
In New York, you do not need to be admitted to the bar to be elected to and serve in certain lower court judicial positions. I believe that village justices and town justices need not be lawyers, but for city courts, and all other courts (county, supreme, surrogates, family, etc.), I believe that you need to have been admitted to the bar for at least 10 years to qualify.
Also, in New York you can read for the bar without having graduated from law school, but you must have taken at least one year of law school and clerked for an admitted lawyer for at least three years.
In New York, certain lower level judges don’t need to be attorneys (District court judges, Town and Village judges and city judges outside of NYC). Others must be practicing attorneys. Those elected to the positions that don’t require they be attorneys are required to attend training sessions in order to take office, and must behave according to the general rules of conduct for judges.
On the federal level, there’s no requirement that Supreme Court Justices be attorneys. As a matter of fact, there are no qualifications at all for Supreme Court justices – if the Senate were willing to go along with it, the president could theoretically appoint a ten-year-old child, to the Supreme Court.
Justices of the Peace in Texas do not have to have law degrees or know anything about the law at all. JP’s preside over Small Claims Court. In addition, all eviction proceedings in Texas must be brought in a JP court. Richard Alderman (“The People’s Lawyer”), a professor at the University of Houston Law School and Houston’s most visible proponent of consumer rights, once said about a Houston JP, “He doesn’t know anything [about the law]. That’s what’s so great. He just listens to both sides, and makes a decision.”
My Dad was a Municipal Judge in New Mexico for many year and has never attended law school. He belonged to an association, the American Judges Association IIRC, (AJA), membership in which is restricted to non-attorney judges in America.
I worked in the court system on an Indian reservation for a short time. Nobody there had a law degree. Not the judges, not the prosecutor, not the public defender. Most of them did have some legal training acquired in seminars and that sort of thing.
I know some people will probably think, “That’s great, with no lawyers there it was probably a fairly-run, common sense system focused on justice and not legal loopholes.” In general I found the opposite to be true. Legal devices and theories were used in inappropriate ways because the people doing it didn’t know any better. I don’t wish to insult the work done by these people, because they were doing the best they could with the training they had, and I have great respect for the job some of them were able to do. On the other hand, I’m still mad that a criminal case I tried to prosecute was declared a mistrial when the defense counsel intentionally introduced evidence which prejudiced his own client. A lawyer would have known that was misconduct, and a judge with better training would certainly not have declared a mistrial over it.
Then again, maybe I just didn’t see the beauty of the system because I’m a lawyer.