Constitutional Crisis, at Least at the Roberts Household
WSJ Washington Wire, 1/1/07
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To be fair, the chief justice, who earns $212,000, wasn’t speaking only for himself, but also for his fellow federal judges, who must survive on as little as $165,200. In his annual report on the federal judiciary, Roberts deployed an array of charts and statistics to buttress his claim that judges, who suffer from lifetime tenure, unsurpassed benefits, and the closest approximation to the status of nobility bestowed by the American republic, are being ground into poverty by the taxpayers’ parsimony.
In 1969, Roberts wrote, federal judges made more than most deans and professors at law schools. Today, he said, they make less, and sometimes less even than first-year associates at the wealthiest private law firms. This “dramatic erosion of judicial compensation will inevitably result in a decline in the quality of persons willing to accept a lifetime appointment as a federal judge,” he wrote, presumably excepting present company.
To be sure, lawyers at corporate firms can make a fortune, as Roberts did himself. At his former private sector employer, Hogan & Hartson, partners’ compensation last year was $725,000, reported American Lawyer magazine. Overall, median pay in 2005 for first-year associates at private firms was $100,000, according to a National Association for Law Placement survey, with those at the smallest firms earning $67,500 and their luckier pals at the biggest firms, with more than 500 lawyers, making $125,000.
On the other hand, according to 2004 figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a federal district judge’s salary is more than 50% higher than that of the median attorney in the U.S. ($95,000). More specifically, the bureau found median pay for lawyers in company management at $126,000; in federal government at $108,000, in legal services at $100,000, in local government at $73,000 and in state government at $70,000. So while judges may make less than many corporate lawyers, they almost certainly make plenty more than the deputy district attorneys, assistant attorneys general, associate public defenders and others who couldn’t or didn’t want to work in the white-shoe ghetto.
Roberts isn’t particularly known as an acolyte of Law and Economics, a legal theory that seeks to harmonize jurisprudence with what its adherents say is rational economic behavior. But he does seem to apply its precepts to judicial recruitment, proposing that unless taxpayers fork over more to the robed ones, the bench will be stuffed with either “(1) persons so wealthy that they can afford to be indifferent to the level of judicial compensation, or (2) people for whom the judicial salary represents a pay increase.” Indeed, he noted that most federal judges now come from public sector jobs, rather than the private bar.
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