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.”
“I am talking about the failure to raise judicial pay.”
Roberts may have employed such dramatic language because he acknowledged that there have been frequent calls for raising the pay of federal judges, with very limited success. The chief justice pointed out that his predecessor William Rehnquist championed the cause for 20 years, and 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 American 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.
Supreme Court clerks are routinely given a signing bonus equivalent to a justice’s annual salary 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.
Some law professors and other legal activists have said the threat to the judiciary by stagnant salaries is overblown and that those who want to be judges aren’t drawn by compensation.
The year-end statement from the chief justice is not exactly in the same category with the State of the Union address. It comes with a dense appendix of the courts’ workload, such as “the national median time from filing of a civil case to its disposition was 8.3 months, which reflected a decline from the 9.5-month median period in 2005.”
Roberts good-naturedly referred to the lack of anticipation of the report, saying he’d once asked Rehnquist why he released it on New Year’s Day.
“He explained that … January 1 was historically a slow news day,” Roberts wrote.
