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wedrifid comments on Amanda Knox: post mortem - Less Wrong
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Only mostly? I had assumed it was an actual legal requirement. That's interesting. Where you come from how many judges have ever not been lawyers and how on earth do they know what they are doing?
EDIT: From the looks of it some (40) states in the US allow non-lawyers to be low level judges, usually for small towns doing straightforward cases. From what I can tell in Australia (and most comparable countries) a law qualification of some sort is required.
I don't know if there are any, but given the sheer number of judges, I would suspect that there have been judges who have never served as lawyers; there is no requirement that a federal judge have ever served as an attorney, and requirements for state judgeship vary by jurisdiction.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics states that a bachelor's degree and work experience are the minimum requirements for judgeship or a magistrate position, but most workers have law degrees, so I'd take it as implied that some do not, and are thus exceedingly unlikely to have been lawyers.
It's rare now, but used to be common, for prospective lawyers to pursue an apprenticeship rather than a law degree. You can still use either as a qualification to take the bar exam.
That depends on the jurisdiction, and also on how exactly you define "lawyer." (Do you mean someone with a law degree, or a member of the local bar association or some equivalent guild? The former is usually, but not quite always, a requirement for the latter.)
If anything, in many state and local jurisdictions within the U.S., judges are elected by popular vote, and I would guess that in some of those there are no such requirements for candidates, at least in theory.
Interestingly, for a U.S. Supreme Court appointment, a law degree from a top 14 law school (and at least one academic degree from Harvard or Yale) has been a de facto requirement for decades, but as recently as the 1930s and 1940s, there have been occasional SCOTUS justices appointed without a law degree at all.
Apparently the last United States Supreme Court Justice without a law qualification was Robert H. Jackson - although he passed the bar exam without official training and was a prominent practicing lawyer. I haven't found the last time someone was appointed to that role without passing the bar but research so far does seem to suggest it is an entirely political position, without qualifications required.
They've all been lawyers, it's just not an official requirement.
Presumably for the same reason there's technically no official requirement that they be human, either.
That is, those with the power to appoint such judges would look like tools if they voted in non-lawyers or non-humans so they will not do either.
(It occurs to me there is a mutual exclusion joke in there somewhere.)
It actually isn't a requirement for Supreme Court justices -- I'm not sure about other cases.