Prof: Pay Raise for Judges Hard to Justify
A University of North Carolina law professor penned an Op-Ed piece this week challenging the notion that giving federal judges a pay raise will improve the quality of the judiciary.
Earlier this week, in his annual report to Congress, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asserted that low judicial pay is creating a constitutional crisis.
But professor Scott Baker writes in the Los Angeles Times that the “available evidence shows no correlation between judicial performance and judicial pay.”
Baker knocks down three arguments for pay raises with counterpoints.
Argument: Federal judges will leave the bench if they don’t earn more.
Counterpoint: In the past seven years, Baker notes that only 15 out of 810 have left the bench before retirement.
Argument: The best-paid lawyers, presumably earning big money, won’t take lower-paying judgeships.
Counterpoint: “Who says the best-paid lawyers would make the best judges?” Baker goes on to preview a forthcoming Boston University Law Review issue that will publish his study on how much money many federal circuit judges gave up in order to take a seat on the bench.
“Some judges gave up a fortune; others gave up little,” Baker writes. “Regardless, the evidence shows that the financial sacrifice a nominee made to become a judge had no effect on his or her judicial performance. It did not affect how they voted in controversial cases, how fast they rendered decisions or whether those decisions were cited by other judges.”
Argument: Without higher salaries, federal judges will mainly be picked from government or public-interest jobs rather than the private sector.
Counterpoint: Baker concedes that the federal court’s composition is headed in this direction. But Baker says that judges who come from the private sector don’t necessarily act differently than their counterparts with backgrounds in government or public-interest jobs.
