How The Guardian Reported on Louisiana's Justice of the Peace Courts
Reporters scanned more than 11,000 pages and processed thousands of hand-written and often incomplete records.
TL;DR
- Louisiana justices of the peace are locally elected, part-time judges who handle weddings, small claims, and evictions.
- These judges can keep a portion of court fees collected, which often come from tenants facing eviction.
- The Guardian investigated how much judges collect and how many evictions they handle, using a combination of software engineering, manual processing, and volunteers.
- Thousands of handwritten financial statements and over 11,000 pages of court records were processed.
- The investigation uncovered a system collecting millions of dollars annually, with some judges earning hundreds of thousands of dollars from fees.
- The Guardian digitized a decade's worth of financial documents and used AI tools like Google Pinpoint, enhanced by a custom Chrome extension, for data extraction.
- A team of volunteers manually verified and corrected the data extracted by AI.
- To track evictions, The Guardian focused on the highest-earning justice of the peace court in Jefferson parish, digitizing 11,000 pages of records from June 2025 to May 2026.
- Computer scripts were used to organize and extract data from eviction documents, with human verification for classifications and outcomes.
- The investigation also identified repeat landlords and tenants facing multiple evictions, and noted rates of legal representation.