I would echo Jeremy Blachman’s comments on en banc that, even though the judicial salaries provide for a substantial lifetime income (as judges with sufficient service can take senior status or retire at full pay). I would also stress the point that judicial salaries should, in part, reflect the relative demand for the talents of those individuals who we would like to see on the federal bench. In other words, judicial salaries should be reasonably responsive to market conditions.
If we believe that federal judges should generally be among the most talented legal minds on the bench, then we are seeking as judges those individuals who can command some of the highest legal salaries — salaries well in excess of the full value of legal salaries. This does not mean the real value of the salary has to match private legal salaries dollar-for-dollar, as there are non-pecuniary benefits to being a judge (hours, jub security, etc.), but it does mean that insofar as a federal judge’s income is substantially below that of a senior partner at a major law firm, the pool of potential judges will shrink, and many of the potential judges we lose will be individuals we might have wanted on the bench (assuming, again, that we want our judges to be among the best and brightest in the profession).
Following this approach would likely mean that federal judges would continue to get paid substantially more than teachers or firemen and other “public-spirited” professions — and, in all likelihood, this differential would grow. But this is the inevitable consequence of wanting people as judges who have high opportunity costs. Note that the same phenomenon occurs in academic salaries. At most universities, law school and business school professors are paid significantly more than, say, literature professors, due to the higher opportunity costs of those qualified to be law professors than those qualified to be literature professors. This does not mean that law professors are more important to universities than literature professors. Rather, it means that the cost of obtaining law professors of a given quality is, in most instances, significantly greater than the cost of obtaining similarly qualified literature professors.
One final note: I do not think this argument for increasing judicial salaries supports raising the salaries of politicians and political officials generally. This is because, as a general rule, the longer an individual works as a politician or high-powered political official, the higher his or her residual value in the marketplace for subsequent employment. That is to say, the typical Senator — unlike the typical federal judge — has the ability to “cash in” on his or her public service and recoup the income sacrificed while working as a politician. Thus, the opportunity cost of their employment as a politician or senior official is comparatively less.
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