A tenant facing eviction should not have to wonder whether the case against them is also a source of income for the judge hearing it. Yet in Louisiana, some justices of the peace personally profit from the fees their courts generate.
A nine-month investigation by The Guardian documented the extraordinary sums Louisiana’s justices of the peace can earn from court fees. One justice, Chuck Cusimano II, took home more than $400,000 in 2025, including nearly $381,000 retained from court fees.
Over the previous decade, the state’s ten highest-revenue justice-of-the-peace courts collected nearly $31 million in fees, almost $12 million of which went directly to the justices.
Eviction cases expose the absolute worst of this design, capturing a predatory loop where a public court functions as a private collections agency, and the judge takes a cut of the processing fee. Landlords pick the courtroom, judges collect a direct cut of the filing fees, and extended proceedings pad the magistrate's pockets. Meanwhile, the displaced tenant is ordered to foot the legal bill.
The Guardian examined more than 11,000 pages of eviction records from Cusimano’s court, between June 2025 and May 2026. During that year, the court handled more than 5,500 eviction cases, nearly 3,300 of which ended in eviction judgements.
Tenants won fewer than 1 percent of all cases for reasons other than a landlord’s failure to appear in court. Only 29 total tenants even had legal representation.
One landlord, 1st Lake Properties, accounted for more than 60 percent of the docket. In 1st Lake’s cases alone, the court denied just three eviction claims on grounds other than the landlord’s failure to appear.
These figures do not establish that Cusimano ruled improperly in any individual case. They do, however, reveal a court processing evictions on an extraordinary scale, justices financially benefiting from that volume, a single landlord accounting for much of this business, and tenants facing overwhelmingly unfavorable outcomes, usually with no legal representation.
Louisiana is not confronting an unfamiliar constitutional problem. Nearly a century ago, the Supreme Court established in Tumey v. Ohio (1927) that a judge’s financial interest in a case could violate due process. In Ward v. Monroeville (1972), it reaffirmed that judicial impartiality could be compromised when a court’s revenue served the financial interests of the government overseeing it. And in Brown v. Vance (1981), the Fifth Circuit addressed a fee system strikingly similar to Louisiana’s, finding that judges paid through civil-case fees had an unconstitutional financial incentive to favor the creditors who brought them business.
Louisiana's lawmakers have not failed to recognize the risk. In June, the state House adopted a resolution warning that fees retained by justices in eviction cases could lead to “higher evictions and a bias for landlords.” But rather than eliminate the financial incentive, lawmakers opted for further study, with recommendations not due until February 2027.
Imagine two courts that produce precisely the same results. Their judges apply the same laws, hear the same arguments, and issue identical rulings. The only difference is that one judge receives a fixed salary, while the other personally earns more whenever cases generate additional fees.
We might have no evidence that the second judge has treated anyone unfairly. But should we consider the courts equally legitimate? The question exposes a limitation in how we tend to think about corruption. We look for the tainted decision, the provable act of favoritism, the moment impartiality gives way to self-interest.
Yet judicial independence is supposed to protect the public from having to make that determination in the first place. A judge's neutrality should not depend on whether we can prove that a financial incentive has influenced a ruling. It should be protected by an arrangement that gives the judge no personal stake in the outcome or volume of the cases before them.
Louisiana's system makes this distinction especially consequential. An eviction is not simply another item on a court's docket. It is the process through which the state can authorize the removal of someone from their home.
When the official overseeing that process personally benefits from the fees it generates, the government has made access to its coercive power a source of private income. Even if every ruling were legally correct, that would remain a failure of institutional design.
The solution is straightforward: judges should receive fixed public salaries, and courts should be funded independently of the fees their cases generate. A court’s finances should not depend on how many disputes reach its doors, much less on proceedings through which one party can deprive another of a home.
Louisiana has treated judicial independence as a question for further study when it should be the very foundation of the system. Tenants should not have to prove judicial misconduct to challenge a system that allows judges to profit from their eviction.
