Who Pays for Michigan’s Judicial Staff? Take a Look Inside the Accountability Gap

Circuit court staff draft opinions, manage dockets, and occasionally send legal threats in a judge’s name. The public funds nearly all of it and can legally request almost none of it.

What Every Michigan Taxpayer Is Already Funding

Michigan runs 303 separate trial courts, circuit, district, probate, and municipal, at a combined annual cost of roughly $1.2 billion. Local government covers most of it. Counties, cities, and townships supply 59 percent of that budget, about $704 million, drawn overwhelmingly from property tax revenue. State and federal contributions cover less than a quarter. The remainder comes from fines, fees, and court costs assessed against the people who show up in front of a judge. That breakdown comes from a joint analysis the Michigan Judicial Council published with the Pew Charitable Trusts and the accounting firm Maner Costerisan in July 2026, built from budget data supplied by 134 of the state’s 135 local court funding units.

The report’s own conclusion is not subtle. Heavy reliance on local funding and on court-assessed fines and fees, its authors write, may create conflicts of interest and undermine equitable operation of the court system. That finding was aimed at the funding structure broadly, not at any single court’s staff. But it hands every Michigan county the same question at once: if we are the ones paying for this, what exactly are we paying for, and who answers for how it’s spent.

A Court With the Legal Right to Set Its Own Payroll

Start with how a circuit court’s budget actually gets built, because the mechanics answer the question before the politics do. Under MCL 600.591, a county board of commissioners must appropriate funds annually for its circuit court’s operation, either line by line or as a lump sum. But if the county wants to appropriate a lump sum rather than itemize it, the statute requires the chief judge to first submit a line-item budget request. In practice, that means the person asking for the money and the person deciding how it gets spent inside the court are frequently the same office.

That arrangement is not an oversight. It is the settled outcome of a fight Michigan’s courts already won, twice. Michigan’s Revised Judicature Act authorizes a circuit court to employ law clerks for the court, or for each individual judge, and authorizes a circuit with ten or more judges, a threshold Wayne’s Third Circuit clears many times over, to employ a judicial assistant. The appointing judges themselves fix the compensation for those positions. The county’s role, by design, is to pay. Deciding who fills the role, what the role does, and what it costs belongs to the bench.

Two Rulings, Fifty Years Apart, Same Answer

It is worth sitting with how deliberately this arrangement was built, because it did not happen by accident or by neglect. In 1971, Wayne’s own circuit judges sued Wayne County for refusing to fund the additional probation officers, law clerks, and a judicial assistant they said they needed. They won, on the theory that an independent judiciary requires the power to determine its own staffing without a local legislative body second-guessing the decision. The county’s obligation was to pay what the court determined it needed.

The legislature tried to claw some of that authority back in 1996, making Wayne County a coemployer of Third Circuit staff with a real role in collective bargaining. The Judicial Attorneys Association, the union representing the very staff attorneys at the center of this arrangement, sued. So did a second group representing court administrators. The Michigan Supreme Court sided with them, striking the coemployer provisions as an unconstitutional intrusion on judicial branch authority. The county kept the bill. It lost, for the second time in thirty years, any meaningful say in who gets hired to help run the court it funds.

What the Chief Judge Can Touch, and What Belongs to the Judge Alone

If the county cannot supervise court staff, the next question is who inside the court can. Michigan Court Rule 8.110 gives a circuit court’s chief judge broad administrative superintending power over every judge and every court employee, including the authority to hire, discipline, or discharge personnel. That is a meaningful check, on paper. A chief judge who learns that a staff member sent an inappropriate letter, made a false public claim, or otherwise embarrassed the court has the formal tools to act.

Except the rule carves out one specific exception, and it is not a small one. The chief judge’s hiring, discipline, and discharge authority does not extend to a judge’s own secretary and law clerk. Those are precisely the roles built to work closest to an individual judge, to draft on the judge’s behalf, and, per the Code of Judicial Conduct itself, to respond publicly on the judge’s behalf. Whatever job title sits on a piece of correspondence from a circuit court judge’s personal staff, if that role functions as the judge’s own secretary or law clerk, the one internal body with clear disciplinary authority over the rest of the court’s staff has no formal reach into it. Oversight of that role, if it exists at all, sits with the individual judge alone.

This is not a hypothetical gap. At the Third Circuit specifically, the position now titled judicial attorney is, by the court’s own institutional memory, the renamed version of what used to be called law clerk. A sitting Third Circuit judicial officer said as much in a 2025 candidate questionnaire, describing her own early career working for a Third Circuit judge as a judicial attorney, adding that the position was still called law clerk back then. If a judge’s personal judicial attorney is functionally today’s name for the judge’s own law clerk, MCR 8.110(C)(3)(d)’s exception is not a theoretical loophole that might apply depending on how a given role is structured. It applies as written. The one person positioned to require or review how that staff member corresponds on a judge’s behalf is the judge who hired them, not the chief judge, not the county paying the salary, and not any body outside the courthouse.

The Code Already Answers Why Staff Talks to the Press

None of this means a staff attorney corresponding with a journalist or a member of the public on a judge’s behalf is doing something unauthorized. It is authorized, expressly. Michigan’s Code of Judicial Conduct, Canon 3(A)(11), permits a judge to respond directly or through a third party to allegations in the media concerning the judge’s conduct in a matter, so long as the response does not touch the merits of a pending case. The same canon requires court staff to observe the same restraint the judge is held to when it comes to public statements about pending matters, and separately directs judges to hold their staff to high standards of courtesy toward anyone the staff deals with in an official capacity.

So the honest answer to why a county-funded court employee is the one fielding a complaint about a judge’s coverage is straightforward: the Code built that channel on purpose, because judges are themselves restricted from responding to criticism the way an ordinary public figure could. The real gap sits one layer down, and it sits in a single word. The Code authorizes a third party to respond to allegations. Respond is doing all of the work in that sentence, and the Code never defines how far it stretches. Correcting a factual record, clarifying context, and answering a reporter’s question are unambiguously responses. Threatening private civil litigation against a publisher, demanding an entire piece of coverage be deleted, or requiring a written admission of wrongdoing before the matter is considered closed are a different category of act. Those are not responses to allegations. They are the assertion of a legal claim, which is a different function requiring a different kind of authorization entirely.

No Michigan ethics opinion, State Bar guidance, or Judicial Tenure Commission decision has ever drawn a line between those two categories of third-party correspondence. That silence is not neutral. It leaves every judge’s personal staff free to decide, unsupervised and without a written standard to measure against, which side of that line their own correspondence falls on, and it leaves the chief judge with no clear standard to point to even where broader administrative authority might otherwise apply.

The Records You’re Legally Barred From Requesting

This is the part of Michigan law that surprises even people who follow courts closely. The state’s Freedom of Information Act, MCL 15.232, defines which government bodies the public can compel to release records, and it explicitly excludes the judiciary from that definition, including the county clerk’s office when it is acting as clerk to the circuit court. Michigan Court Rule 8.119(D) closes the remaining gap: court records generally are not subject to FOIA requests unless a separate statute, rule, case, or court order specifically says otherwise. A circuit court’s internal staffing structure, correspondence guidelines, disciplinary history, or job descriptions are not public records a citizen can force into the open the way they could with almost any other tax-funded office in the state.

There is one door left open, and it matters. Wayne County, as the funding unit and nominal employer of record for Third Circuit staff, is itself a public body fully subject to FOIA. A request aimed at the county rather than the court can reach whatever the county actually holds: appropriation records, budget line items, and any correspondence the court’s administration has sent the county about staffing or spending. But the two Supreme Court rulings above already tell you the size of that opening. Because the county’s operational role in staff supervision was constitutionally narrowed to funding, the county may simply not possess the records a requester actually wants. The court holds them. The court is the one body a records request cannot reach.

What Public Money Actually Buys, and What It Doesn’t Itemize

Scale matters here. Wayne County passed a $2.2 billion operating budget for fiscal year 2025-26, and its own commissioners have shown they are capable of engaging directly with circuit court staffing costs when the category is put in front of them. During the county’s budget deliberations that year, attorneys who represent children in Wayne County Circuit Court cases appeared before the commission to argue that low compensation was driving away experienced counsel. Commission Chair Alisha Bell responded by directing that a funding request be brought to a dedicated circuit court budget hearing for further discussion. That is what functioning budget oversight of a court category looks like: a named line item, a public hearing, commissioners on the record asking questions.

Nothing about a circuit court’s research and correspondence staff, the judicial attorneys and judicial assistants the Revised Judicature Act specifically authorizes judges to hire and pay, gets that same treatment. Those positions exist inside a much larger appropriation the chief judge submits as a lump sum, exactly as MCL 600.591 permits. The commission can approve the total. It has no statutory mechanism to ask what any individual role within it costs, does, or answers to, unless someone inside the court chooses to volunteer that information.

The Reform Already Sitting on the Shelf

Michigan’s legislature has already acknowledged, formally, that something about how trial courts are funded needs fixing. The Trial Court Funding Commission was created by statute in 2017, directly in response to a Michigan Supreme Court ruling that struck down the practice of funding day-to-day court operations by assessing costs against criminal defendants. That commission exists. It has a legislative mandate to review Michigan’s trial court funding system and recommend changes. What it does not have, based on the mandate that created it, is any charge to examine staffing transparency, correspondence policy, or public accountability for the people employed inside the courts that money funds.

That is the actual opening here, and it is a narrower one than it might first appear. The commission’s existence proves the legislature is willing to revisit how trial courts are funded when a court forces the question. It does not prove the legislature has ever been asked to revisit who oversees the staff that funding pays for. Those are different questions, and only one of them has been asked so far.

The Actual Question

None of this requires assuming bad faith on any individual court employee’s part. The staffing structure Wayne County’s Third Circuit operates under is not unique to Wayne County, and it was not invented by any judge or judicial attorney working inside it today. It is the settled outcome of two Michigan Supreme Court rulings that prioritized judicial independence over external control, decades before anyone working in the Third Circuit’s offices held their current position. The Code of Judicial Conduct’s own provisions for third-party responses to press criticism were written in good faith, as a reasonable accommodation for judges who are themselves barred from defending their conduct in public the way anyone else could.

What the structure leaves behind is a genuine blind spot, and the state’s own Judicial Council just quantified how much money sits inside it. Taxpayers supply 59 percent of a $1.2 billion annual system. The body legally positioned to ask hard questions about how that money gets spent inside individual courts, the county board of commissioners, has been told twice by the Michigan Supreme Court that its role stops at the check. The body legally positioned to request records, any interested citizen, is blocked at the courthouse door by the same statute that opens every other government office in the state. And the body with the clearest internal authority to supervise staff conduct, the chief judge, has a rule on the books that exempts exactly the roles closest to individual judges from that authority.

Somewhere in that gap sits every judicial attorney, judicial assistant, and staff position across Michigan’s 303 trial courts, doing legitimate work under a structure nobody outside the judiciary was ever meant to see clearly. The question this piece leaves open is not whether that structure is legal. It plainly is, and the Michigan Supreme Court has settled the point twice. The question is whether a system funded almost entirely by the public should remain this hard for the public to see into, and which body, chief judge, legislature, or the courts themselves, is actually positioned to change that.