Overview: A Targeted Takeover Disguised as Reform
Every Louisianan deserves a court system that is fast, fair, and efficient. Louisiana’s system can often fall short of that standard in heartbreaking ways. There’s plenty of room for real reform, grounded in careful study and science. There are efforts underway to do just that statewide.
However, a wave of new legislation moving through the Legislature is currently pushing those statewide efforts aside in favor of targeting the judges and courts of New Orleans. These bills—SB 256, SB 197, SB 217 by Sen. Jay Morris (Monroe), and HB 911 by Rep. Dixon McMakin (Baton Rouge)—are masquerading as reform, but they won’t save tax dollars or drive efficiency. They are political bills designed to replace the will of New Orleans voters with state control. The people of New Orleans deserve to have a say in their judiciary, just like the voters of every other parish.
| Legislation | What the bill does | Effective date |
|---|---|---|
| SB 197 (Morris) | Reduces the number of judges on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal in New Orleans from 12 to 10 by removing one first-district seat and one at-large seat. Current judges serve out their terms, and the reduction occurs by ending elections for those positions as they become vacant under state law applicable to Orleans Parish. | Effective upon enactment |
| SB 217 (Morris) | Reduces the number of judges across multiple Orleans Parish courts, including decreasing the Civil District Court from 14 to 12 judges and the Criminal District Court from 12 to 9 divisions by eliminating specified seats and ending elections for those positions. It also reduces judgeships in other local courts, including Municipal and Traffic Court and Juvenile Court. The bill adjusts the number of judgeships within existing courts but does not combine or restructure the courts themselves. | Effective upon enactment |
| SB 256 (Morris) | Creates a single clerk of court for Orleans Parish by placing the Civil District Court clerk in charge of both civil and criminal court functions, eliminating the separate Criminal District Court clerk. The bill applies only to the clerk’s office and does not combine the courts themselves, which remain separate. It also includes provisions limiting termination of current criminal clerk staff through January 2027 to maintain continuity of functions currently handled by that office, including election-related duties. | Effective upon enactment |
| HB 911 (McMakin) | Reorganizes the Orleans Parish court system by consolidating the Civil, Criminal, and Juvenile courts into a single new district court and reducing the number of judges by abolishing specified seats. It eliminates the standalone Juvenile Court, creates a single clerk of court, and consolidates court funding and administration into a unified system. | Effective upon enactment (with major provisions effective January 1, 2027) |
Not about Efficiency: The Clerk “Merger”
The clearest example of the bad faith in the package is SB 256, which forces a merger between the clerks’ offices of the Civil Court and Criminal Court in New Orleans. That isn’t a typo–the bill merges just the clerk’s offices of the two courts, but leaves the two courts entirely separate. If the bill passed, Orleans Parish would still have the two separate courts, doing different things, in buildings across town from each other. The “merged” clerk would still serve two sets of judges, operate two different filing systems, supervise staff at two separate sites, work with two distinct sets of institutional actors, and apply two distinct bodies of law, from the federal constitution down to the state public records regulations.
The main result of “merging” these two offices would be chaos and delay. In fact, concerns over the mess SB 256 will create have already forced an amendment. At the request of the Secretary of State, the bill now requires that no current criminal clerk employees can be fired before January 2027. The Secretary of State had grown worried about the impact that SB 256 would have on the continuity of election administration, a vital function currently managed by the criminal clerk’s office in Orleans Parish.
There is no efficiency here; the bill saves zero dollars. Instead, its intended consequence is to “un-elect” the Criminal Clerk-elect, Calvin Duncan before he has even taken office. Duncan is a unique figure—a wrongfully convicted exoneree who spent nearly 30 years in prison before winning a decisive, and closely-watched election to lead the office. When a bill saves no money but successfully removes an official the people just voted for, it begins to look less like reform, and more like intervention.
Staffing for the Hub, Not the Neighborhood
The other bills are similar: They eliminate judgeships from Orleans Parish without the input of the people or elected officials of Orleans, and without applying the same standards to judgeships statewide. To justify cutting judges, the bills’ authors use “per capita” math— counting the number of residents and saying, “you have too many judges for this many people.” But this isn’t how courts work. Courts aren’t staffed based on who sleeps nearby, they are staffed based on what happens nearby. And a lot happens in New Orleans. Whether you live in Monroe or St. Tammany or Los Angeles, if you slip and fall at the Superdome, your case is heard in a New Orleans court.
New Orleans is an engine for the state’s economy, and a regional hub. The city welcomed 19 million visitors in 2024 alone, and large portions of the populations of the neighboring parishes spend time working or playing in New Orleans daily. By using the wrong yardstick, the state is intentionally creating a massive, targeted traffic jam in our legal system.
The Inevitable Result: Government by Appointment
The likeliest consequence of SB 256 is not efficiency, but instability in how cases are handled in New Orleans courts. Morris himself has suggested, in his testimony on SB 197 before the Senate Judiciary Committee, that ad hoc judges could be used to fill gaps if backlogs emerge. But ad hoc judges are designed for limited, temporary assignments—not to replace a large number of sitting judges on an ongoing basis.
On the day these bills take effect, the number of cases in New Orleans will not decrease. If the workload remains but elected judges are reduced, the system will have to rely on alternative mechanisms to keep courts functioning. In practice, that means greater reliance on judges assigned through state-level processes rather than elected by the people of New Orleans—shifting accountability away from local voters and toward the institutions making those assignments. The result is the same: fewer locally elected judges, and more decisions made by individuals who are not directly accountable to the community they serve.
Conclusion: Facts Over Grudges
The state already has a professional mechanism for making decisions about judgeships and court staffing: the Judicial Council of the Supreme Court, which is currently finalizing a rigorous ‘case weights’ study to measure actual workloads. Chief Justice John Weimer addressed this work in his recent budget testimony, urging that judicial reform be handled ‘without politics, partisanship, or personalities’ while ‘maintaining the diversity of our state at the same time.’ By rushing these bills through before that study is complete, the authors are ignoring the state’s highest legal authority in favor of the very ‘personalities’ and ‘politics’ the Chief Justice warned against.
The authors are pushing to pass these bills before the facts are known. This tells us they aren’t interested in what the data shows, they are interested in what the politics allow. Real reform waits for the facts, and applies itself evenly–a power grab can’t afford to. Breaking the New Orleans courts, to take control at the state level isn’t “small government.” It’s an overreach that will leave victims waiting for justice, taxpayers footing the bill, and voters in Orleans silenced in a manufactured crisis.