Want to become a judge in Kansas? A high school education is all you need. | Opinion

Help wanted: Kansas Magistrate Judge. Must have high school diploma (or equivalent) and (possibly) be willing to relocate. For more information, visit www.kscourts.org/judges/Become-a-Judge .

If you get arrested or sued in Kansas, the judge who hears your case doesn’t necessarily need to be a lawyer, or even have seen the inside of a college classroom or a courtroom.

I am not making this up. It’s state law.

As laid out in Kansas Statute 20-334, here are the total qualifications required for consideration for a magistrate judge’s robe and gavel — the applicant must be:

▪ a resident of the county at the time of taking office and while holding office.

▪ a graduate of a high school, a secondary school, or the equivalent.

▪ either a lawyer admitted to practice in the state or able to pass an examination given by the Kansas Supreme Court to become certified within 18 months.

There’s a training program and a manual to help you pass the required certification exam. If you’re selected for the job, you take office immediately and can stay for at least the next 18 months, or until the next general election.

Magistrate judges make from $76,000 to more than $100,000 a year. There are 85 of them, about half split between legally trained and lay judges.

They don’t have all the power and authority of a full state district court judge. But they can do lots of things, including conducting trials on traffic infractions and misdemeanor crimes, and conduct arraignments and preliminary hearings in felony cases. They can decide civil cases up to $10,000.

Comparing this to other current government job openings, it seems odd to require less qualification than to be a spot-duty substitute teacher (60 hours of college credit) or a dogcatcher in Derby (a year of experience working with animals).

I put this question to two members of the judiciary committees in the Kansas Legislature, state Rep. John Carmichael of Wichita and state Sen. David Haley of Kansas City, and they both gave me the same analogy: Andy Griffith.

In the classic “Andy Griffith Show,” he played Sheriff Andy Taylor, who kept the peace in the fictional town of Mayberry, not with guns or formal legal education, but with corn-fed common sense and the esteem of his community.

“I think Sheriff Taylor would meet the standard of being a good magistrate,” said Haley.

They also said lay magistrate judges are generally appointed in remote and lightly populated counties, because there aren’t enough lawyers, and the ones who are out there are needed to represent suspects and clients.

“The question is: Can you find enough people to fill these jobs?” Carmichael said. “That’s what happens when you don’t have enough lawyers.”

There are only two law schools in Kansas, at the University of Kansas in Lawrence and Washburn University in Topeka. An attempt to establish a law school in Wichita, Presidents College School of Law, died in 2003 because it couldn’t muster $25 million to get accredited.

Carmichael said the one requirement he’d like to see added to the qualifications for magistrate judge would be a criminal background check, to eliminate the (admittedly slim) possibility that someone could earn a GED in prison and then become a magistrate judge when released.

In the larger counties, magistrate judges are usually lawyers. There’s an opening right now in Johnson County and there’s a selection committee to recommend candidates to the governor. That application form is heavily weighted toward applicants’ legal training and experience.

After years of trying, Sedgwick County finally got a slot at the courthouse for a magistrate, to take some of the low-level caseload off the district judges.

So far, it’s been kind of a disaster.

Former state Rep. Jesse Burris, hand-picked by Republican leaders to essentially inherit his father-in-law Pete DeGraaf’s s seat in the Legislature when DeGraaf resigned in 2017, was the GOP’s nominee for magistrate judge last year.

He won the November election without opposition.

But then he turned down the job he’d just been elected to, to go work in the attorney general’s office for Kris Kobach, his former boss when Kobach served as secretary of state.

So here we are, seven months later, with no magistrate judge and the governor will have to appoint one.

And to the USD-259 high school class of 2023, sorry, you missed your chance. The application period closed April 21.