It's a Monday October morning in the small coal mining town of Logan, nestled in Logan County in the southwestern portion of West Virginia. Magistrate Joseph L. Mendez is tucked into his wood-paneled office in the basement of the courthouse. He can't see the fog lifting from the winding roads outside of town. But Mendez has decorated his office with photos of his family, including his baby son. He can look at them and his Captain America bobblehead between breaks from the hours he spends in the courtroom, which is also in the basement.

Logan County, Mendez says, is "God, coal and gun country." It's also home to the Hatfield-McCoy Trails, more than 700 miles of backwoods roads named after the storied feuding families.

Before heading to the bench, Mendez stuffs a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit into his mouth and talks about how the hardworking people of Logan County have lost two generations to back-to-back drug epidemics. The first was illegal use of methamphetamine, followed by fentanyl abuse.

Mendez isn't a lawyer and never went to law school. Nor does he have a bachelor's degree, but he did take some criminal justice classes in college. He used to work as an assistant manager at a movie theater, and before that, he says, he was a punk rocker.

He grew up in the community and has been a magistrate since 2016. Mendez presides over a wide variety of cases, including civil disputes up to $10,000, misdemeanor and felony arraignments, protective orders and search warrant applications.

In West Virginia, the state constitution prohibits requiring that magistrates be lawyers. As of January, seven of the state's 169 magistrates were lawyers, according to Jennifer Bundy, public information officer for the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia.

Mendez, 40, earns an annual salary of $63,250. In West Virginia, magistrates are elected by their community every four years.

"Magistrates are the gatekeepers of the judiciary," Mendez says between bites. “We handle all kinds of stuff as a sort of filter for the circuit court. We're in what we call the dungeon here. We're in the mud with the rest of the folks.”

As of 2022, more than half of the states allow nonlawyers to serve as judges in lower-level local courts, according to the National Center for State Courts. Depending upon the state, the positions nonlawyers can fill include justices of the peace, magistrates, municipal judges or probate judges. The types of cases over which they preside vary by state but can include eviction, probate and civil disputes with limits on the financial stake.

Nonlawyer judges tend to serve in rural areas, although not exclusively. States that allow nonlawyers to sit on the bench–including Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania–are holding on to deeply embedded traditions that emphasize local, practical solutions, says Ann Schiavone, an associate professor of law at Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University.

"The argument in favor of having [lower court judges] that don't have to have law degrees is that it allows for justice at a community level to help get smaller problems solved without clogging up an already overstressed court system," says Schiavone, who teaches constitutional law. "It's an opportunity for what you might call 'rough justice,' but there can be questions and concerns about nonlawyers imposing the rule of law."

Nonlawyer judgeships tend to be elected positions, and the legal requirements, or lack thereof, are often written into the constitution or state law.

While state court judge salaries vary significantly, the mean and median salaries for higher-level state court judges were all over $180,000 in 2024, according to the National Center for State Courts.

In contrast, magistrates, municipal court judges and justices of the peace often earn well under $100,000 annually, according to law professor Sara Sternberg Greene, who along with Kristen M. Renberg wrote a law review article on the topic of nonlawyer judges.

Nonlawyer judges in general must abide by the same state ethics code as judges with law degrees. The amount of initial and continuing education nonlawyer judges must obtain varies by state. In some states, nonlawyer judges can sit on the bench before they receive their initial legal training, according to Greene and state judicial websites.

A nonlawyer judge can be a cost-effective way to make sure communities have judges, says David J. Sachar, director of the Center for Judicial Ethics at the National Center for State Courts.

But lack of judicial experience could create problems. "In some ways, it's like giving someone without a driver's license an 18-wheeler and telling them to get on the road," Sachar says. "What could possibly go wrong?"

He adds that every judge represents the judiciary and must make decisions that affect the legal rights and lives of individuals.

The history of allowing individuals with little or no legal training to become judges in the U.S. can be traced back to before the Revolutionary War, according to Greene and Renberg.

Their essay, "Judging Without a JD," published in the Columbia Law Review in 2022, describes the growth of the legal industry in the late 1700s and early 1800s, when the self-taught lawyer and apprenticeship system gave way to a more formalized law school education. States developed stricter requirements for passing state bar exams to practice law.

As states began to professionalize the legal industry, higher court judicial positions became increasingly reserved for lawyers, but state lower courts took longer to transition, and some never did, according to Greene's research.

"There was this sense that we don't want outsiders or elites coming into our communities to make decisions about our communities," says Greene, who teaches contracts and poverty law as the Katharine T. Bartlett Distinguished Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law.

But by the 1930s, the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement and the American Bar Association called to end the practice of allowing nonlawyer judges. Some states eliminated nonlawyer judges completely, but others didn't, instead honing rules over the types of cases nonlawyer judges could oversee, along with oversight and discipline, according to Greene.

Lower state court judges still "wield substantial power over the lives of people who are disproportionately poor and disproportionately Black and Latinx," Greene wrote in the essay.

Also, nonlawyer judges in many states preside over eviction cases.

"People think that eviction cases are simple, but the fact is, there can be complex legal issues involved, and these judges just aren't trained to handle them," Greene says. "Procedural due process matters."

There aren't enough studies on the differences between nonlawyer judges and their lawyer counterparts in ethics violations or the way they handle cases, according to Greene.

"We need more information just to decide what requirements judges should have," she says. “Does a law degree make a difference in the outcome of a case? Does a college degree? We just don't know enough.”

In New York, town and village justices serve part-time and are not required to be lawyers. They hear nearly 1 million cases annually, from traffic violations to arraignments of defendants charged with most felonies, according to the New York State Unified Court System website.

Donald R. Spaccio, a nonlawyer New York justice, made headlines when he agreed to resign in September 2024 after an investigation into his attendance at President Donald Trump's rally on Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. He'd also previously in other incidents shouted at police officers when asked to remove a propane cannon from his roof and yelled profanities at a local code enforcement officer, according to the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct.

"I went to the rally because I felt a calling to be there," he says. "I didn't feel good about the way the election turned out."

Spaccio, a printer, says he would go to the rally again and that he doesn't miss being on the bench.

"Judges may not engage in political activity except for a limited time when running for office, and even then, there are constraints on what they may do," Commission Administrator Robert H. Tembeckjian said in a press release. “Whether or not a judge was a candidate, attending the rally in Washington on January 6, 2021, was impermissible.”

Of the state's roughly 2,110 town and village justices presently in office, approximately 860 have gone to law school, according to the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct in its 2023 annual report. Since 1978, 123 nonlawyer justices have been removed from office, compared with 14 justices who are lawyers. In addition, 210 nonlawyer justices have received public censure in contrast with 31 justices who are lawyers, according to the commission.

In another case last year, Dwight A. Williamson, who served as a nonlawyer magistrate in Logan County alongside Mendez, retired Dec. 31. Williamson's retirement came after a West Virginia judicial disciplinary investigation into an opinion piece Williamson wrote in October 2023.

In the article, which was published in two local newspapers, Williamson, a former reporter, wrote that he wouldn't be opposed to a law stating, "Anyone caught and convicted transporting deadly illegal drugs into the state of West Virginia could be executed."

He had previously been suspended, admonished and warned for other actions, including a social media post in which he commented about a search warrant he issued.

"I will simply say that magistrates are always in the political crosshairs of those who can file or cause to be filed ethics complaints," Williamson wrote in response to an ABA Journal query. "I will always choose freedom of speech and freedom of the press as the American way."

Charles Gardner Geyh, a distinguished professor and the John F. "Jack" Kimberling Chair at Indiana University Bloomington Maurer School of Law, says while all judges can find themselves in trouble, nonlawyers can struggle with concepts like the rules curbing political activity, limiting ex parte communications or maintaining impartiality.

"They simply haven't "internalized the ethics and culture of judging" in the same way as someone who attended law school and then practiced law or clerked first," Geyh says. He served as reporter to four ABA commissions related to judicial conduct and writes extensively about the judiciary.

But Stephen Gillers, the Elihu Root Professor of Law Emeritus at New York University School of Law, emphasizes that the risk of error by nonlawyer judges can be reduced through appropriate training.

Our society needs to get over "the mystique of the three-year law degree," says Gillers, who specializes in legal ethics.

"A smart person can learn what the evidence rules are in particular areas and develop expertise, especially when the same types of cases are being handled over and over," he adds.

Over the decades, states that have nonlawyer judicial positions also have developed requirements and systems for initial and then continuing legal education.

In Texas, for example, there are about 800 justices of the peace, an elected office that does not, under the state constitution, require a law degree to perform. They handle truancy issues, set bail and oversee cases involving debt claims, evictions and civil disputes involving $20,000 or less.

More than 90% do not have law degrees, according to Thea Whalen, the executive director of the Texas Justice Court Training Center in Austin.

For both JDs and non-JDs, training for the job requires completing 80 hours of new judge education by the end of their first year in office. Approximately 26 of those hours occur before the judges take the bench, Whalen says. After that, their continuing education is a minimum of 20 hours each year. Judges who are lawyers can have more options in the classes they take for continuing education, she adds.

"From the very beginning, we start with basics," Whalen says. "Here's what a plaintiff is. Here's what the burden of proof is and how it differs in civil versus criminal. We teach them their role and their duties, and we tell them that it's OK to ask questions. It's very much a culture of we help make sure they are successful."

The training center also provides the justices of the peace with a website full of resources divided by topic and a team of lawyers who are subject matter experts who can answer questions.

Whalen says that nonlawyer judges tend to be “pull yourself up by the bootstraps kind of people.”

In Wisconsin, municipal judges do not need to be lawyers, although municipalities can change their requirements to include that their judges be licensed to practice law. Municipal judges are elected, and about half are lawyers, according to the Wisconsin court system website. They hear cases involving traffic and ordinance violations; first-time offenses for operating while intoxicated; and juvenile matters, including truancy and underage drinking. All new municipal judges are required to attend a multiday orientation seminar, according to the website. After that, they must earn at least four credits of approved continuing education each year.

Wisconsin Municipal Court Judge Jerry Jaye, a former police officer, has been on the bench since 1997. Serving the residents of 23 municipalities in parts of four counties in east-central Wisconsin, Jaye, 76, says he presides over three to four court sessions each week and is paid approximately $45,000 annually.

He averages about 9,500 cases each year. Jaye says he studies the applicable law when prepping for trials, especially if the case involves something unusual.

"Sure, there are times I think, 'Golly, I wish I was a lawyer,'" Jaye says. “But if I were a lawyer, maybe I would take for granted that I knew the law, and I wouldn't study, and I wouldn't be as careful as I am.”

Maggie Sawyer, a justice of the peace in Brady, Texas, says she started off her career working in child protective services and went to college but did not graduate. Sawyer, 58, has been on the bench 11 years and is paid $50,000 annually. Her work includes conducting inquests, hearing small claims disputes, hearing cases involving evictions and issuing arrest and search warrants.

Good judges, she says, hone their listening skills, treat people with respect and have patience.

"Sometimes people just want to be heard," Sawyer says.

Before Joseph Mendez was elected to the bench, his father, Johnny "Big John" Mendez, was a magistrate judge, then Logan County sheriff. In 2004, the father pleaded guilty to federal charges that he accepted $10,000 in illegal contributions, then used the money to buy votes, according to news reports.

"I didn't like how things ended for my father in his career. I wanted to put faith back in the family name," the son says.

Mendez has an Appalachian accent, and when each defendant arrives, he speaks to them in a firm and matter-of-fact way.

"Your license is going to be revoked until you take that class, brother," Mendez says to a defendant who had been convicted of driving under the influence. "You gotta take that class."

Sometimes Mendez knows the people who appear before him. He says he tries to help them, but some people aren't ready to dig themselves out their problems yet, particularly in the criminal cases.

"I give people a rope, and they can either hang themselves on it or use it to climb their way out of their problems," says Mendez, who doesn't think a law degree is necessary to do what he does. “The majority of what we do is common sense.”