Chief makes judges’ pay the top issue
on Dec 31, 2006 at 11:45 pm
Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., continuing the efforts of his two predecessors to persuade the public and Congress that federal judges need better pay, made that campaign the single focus of his annual end-of-year report Monday morning. “I am going to discuss only one issue — in an effort to increase even more the chances that people will take notice,” Roberts said in calling for “a substantial salary increase” The usual laundry list of statistics about the federal courts’ work showed up in an appendix. The full report can be found here.
Roberts made both constitutional and statistical arguments to bolster his lament over “the failure to raise judiical pay.”
The issue, he said, “has now reached the level of a constitutional crisis.” He argued that “inadequate compensation directly threatens the viability of life tenure, and if tenure in office is made uncertain, the strength and independence judges need to uphold the rule of law — even when it is unpopular to do so — will be seriously eroded.” After decades of “congressional inaction,” he said, many judges are leaving the bench to return to private law practice — 17 in the last two years, 38 in the past six. There will also be a decline in the quality of persons willing to accept a lifetime appointment, the Chief Justice said. The judiciary, he said, threatens to be dominated by judges who are so wealthy they can afford to be indifferent to the salary level, or people for whim a judicial salary is a pay raise.
Statistically, the Chief Justice cited three comparisons. First, he said, in 1969, federal district judges made 21 percent more than the dean at the Harvard Law School and 43 percent more than its senior law professors. Today, the judges are paid about half what the deans and senior professor at top schools are paid, he said. (“We do not even talk about comparisons with the practicing bar anymore,” he said sadly, given that first-year law graduates in some cities will make more in the first year than experienced federal judges.
Second, the Chief Justice siad the average U.S. workers’ wages have risen 17.8 percent in real terms (adjusted for inflation) since 1969, while federal judicial pay has declined 23.9 percent.
Third, Roberts noted a significant chance in where federal judges come from — especially trial judges. In the 1950s, roughly 65 percent came from the practicing bar, with 35 percent from the public sector. Today, roughly 60 percent come from the public sector and less than 40 percent from private practice. That, he said, “changes the nature of the federal judiciary.”
The appendix to Roberts’ report contains some interesting details about the impact on the lower federal courts of the Court’s major decisions on criminal sentencing, U.S. v. Booker and Blakely v. Washington.
(NOTE: The Supreme Court, in issuing the Chief Justice’s year-end report, had specified that the report was not to be released publicly until 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. The Washington Post’s website, however, broke that embargo well over an hour before the release time, and this has been picked up on the Internet. This blog felt that it could no longer observe the release time, and thus this report has appeared about 20 minutes early.)
