What is the approximate number of quasi-judicial officers?
There are at least 9,000 of these positions in the nation’s state courts. Information on the number of quasi-judicial officers can be found in the state court structure charts in the annual reports of the Court Statistics Project of the National Center for State Courts. See State Court Caseload Statistics: Supplement to Examining the Work of the State Courts (Williamsburg, VA: National Center for State Courts). More than half (4,083/7556) of the quasi-judicial officers are designated as “justices of the peace” (see Table 1 below) and more than one in four (2092/7556) are commonly called “magistrates.” Hence, several of the positions are small in number and generally found in only a few states. Table 1Frequency of Quasi-Judicial Positions Overall: General and Limited Jurisdictions CombinedPositionFrequencyJustice of the Peace 4,083Magistrate 2,092Clerk 100Mayor 578Commissioner 472Surrogate 51Chancellor 84Master 87Referee 0Alderman 9Total 7,677*Includes part-time positionsSource: State C
