Chief justice calls for higher pay for judges

WASHINGTON — Chief Justice John Roberts devoted his annual year-end report on the state of the nation's courts to just one issue, albeit one he said has "now reached the level of a constitutional crisis and threatens to undermine the strength and independence of the federal judiciary."

He continued: "I am talking about the failure to raise judicial pay."

Roberts may have employed such dramatic language because he acknowledges that there have been frequent calls for raising the pay of federal judges, with very limited success. The chief justice points out that his predecessor, William Rehnquist, championed the cause for 20 years, and that numerous commissions and reports advocating pay increases have failed to excite Congress and the citizenry.

"This is usually the point at which many will put down the annual report and return to the Rose Bowl, but bear with me," Roberts wrote.

Congress has not acted on judicial pay for 2007, so for now salaries remain at their 2006 levels. That means Roberts would continue to be paid $212,100, with associate Supreme Court justices at $203,000, appeals-court judges at $175,100 and federal district-court judges at $165,200 annually.

That's far more than the average U.S. worker makes, of course, but Roberts argued that while worker wages have increased nearly 18 percent in real terms since 1969, federal judicial pay has declined nearly 24 percent. And he said that while federal judges in 1969 made more money than the deans at the nation's top law schools, they now make only about half what deans and top law professors make.

"We do not even talk about comparisons with the practicing bar anymore," Roberts added parenthetically. Supreme Court clerks are routinely given a signing bonus equivalent to the annual salary of a justice when they join one of Washington's top law firms after a year at the court, and Roberts pointed out that beginning lawyers often make as much as the experienced federal judges before whom they practice.

"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," Roberts wrote.

Some law professors and other legal activists have said that the threat to the judiciary by stagnant salaries is overblown and that those who want to be judges aren't drawn by compensation.

But Roberts and others — Justice Antonin Scalia has also recently called for increases — say it is affecting the type of lawyer who wants to be a judge. More judges recently have a background in the public sector rather than the practicing bar, for instance.

"The 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," Roberts wrote, adding that the judiciary should not be made up of the independently wealthy or "people for whom the judicial salary represents a pay increase."

Roberts did not indicate how much he thinks judges should be paid.

Material from the Los Angeles Times

is included in this report