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BREAKING: Judge who allowed FBI to search Washington Post reporter’s home rips into Justice Department for not informing him of the law that explicitly bars raids of reporters

Interesting (new to me) thing about US law. I suppose it makes sense in a system where many judges are elected but where prosecutors are expected to be professionals. In the UK, where judges are professionals, there's a legal fiction in court that the judge knows all the law. /

these judges are not elected; federal magistrate judges are hired by the chief judge of a district, and the chief judge is appointed by the president there are very few places in the US where judges are not required to be lawyers and even in those instances, they only handle very low-level issues

sorry just seeing this again. a handful of state court systems do allow non-lawyers to be magistrates, but to my knowledge they are (again) limited almost entirely to things like traffic tickets and spending a night in the drunk tank, etc.