Louisiana's justice of the peace courts operate in a structural blind spot. Locally elected part-time judges handle evictions, small claims, and wage garnishments from ad hoc rooms across the state. They accept hearsay evidence. They keep no computerized records. And critically, they pocket whatever fee income remains after expenses — a direct financial incentive to maximize case volume, particularly evictions. The Guardian's investigation required nine months and a team of reporters, engineers, and seven volunteers to crack open a system that resists scrutiny by design. The state's legislative auditor collects sworn financial statements from these courts but stores them in no analyzable form. Most are handwritten. Formats change year to year. One version of the form didn't even require judges to state how much money they kept. The team digitized roughly 3,400 financial statements spanning 2016 to 2025, using Google Pinpoint powered by Gemini for first-pass extraction, then building a custom Chrome extension to accelerate verification. Every number was manually checked by at least one volunteer. The eviction data was even harder to obtain. There are no online dockets, no case databases, no searchable records of any kind. The team chose the highest-earning court in the state — the fifth justice of the peace court in Jefferson Parish — and physically scanned a year's worth of records from bankers boxes in the courthouse: 11,000 pages covering June 2025 to May 2026. Custom scripts using OCR and natural language processing organized the pages, but 41% of orders lacked corresponding judgments and required hand classification of judges' handwritten notes by a team of three. What they found is a system that extracts millions annually in court fees, disproportionately from poor tenants facing eviction. The highest-earning judge collected between $150,000 and $400,000 per year in a district with an eviction filing rate nearly three times the national average. The financial incentive structure is stark: more evictions mean more filings, more filings mean more fees, and more fees mean higher personal income for the judge presiding over those cases. The methodological rigor here matters. AI was used only for initial data extraction from financial statements — never for the eviction records themselves. Every AI-extracted number was human-verified. Landlords were manually crosswalked to clean lists. Legal representation was identified by searching for handwritten abbreviations like 'atty' or 'esq' on court documents. The team acknowledged undercounts where they existed and used calculated salaries only for aggregate totals, never for individual judges without explicit disclosure. The deeper story is about what opacity enables. A court system with no digital records, no public dockets, and no standardized reporting is not accidentally opaque — it is structurally resistant to accountability. The judges who earn the most have the least oversight. The tenants who pay the fees have the least visibility into how the system works. The state that authorizes the arrangement has built no infrastructure to monitor it. The Guardian has published abbreviated datasets on GitHub, but the underlying reality persists: a publicly authorized system where elected judges have a direct personal financial stake in the volume of evictions they process, operating behind handwritten ledgers that no one was reading until a news organization spent nine months building the tools to do so.
