More on Judges' Pay

Honest, folks, I am really not opposed to Federal Judges getting a pay hike (cf. link)—I just believe that this issue (like most issues?) is more complicated than it looks at first glance. Anyway, several points.

First: I said the other day that the judge earns “about four times” the average family income. I think I exaggerated. From a well-documented Wiki, I learn that the median family income for 2006 was $48,201 (link). So, only 3.4 times.

But it occurred to me to wonder: how does this number compare with past times? I went back to 1967, when I was finishing law school and flirting with the idea of a clerkship (I didn’t do it). The Federal judge $30,000 a year then, which looked astronomic to me (I figured if I ever hit $10,000 a year, I would be in tall cotton). Fiddling around with a CPI inflator/deflator, I came up with the notion that the Federal judges’ annual income was close to five times median family income in 1967.

So, advantage judges. They clearly have slipped behind. But there remains the nagging question of pensions and benefits. I feel I never know as much as I want to about how they compute these “medians”—when do they include fringes, and for how much? But my guess is that just in general, more fringes were “off the books” in 1967 than they are today, which would suggest that in general, the typical family is doing less well than the numbers would suggest. So, judges might be doing a bit better than the numbers suggest.

As to fringes, there is in particular, that matter of the judge’s lifetime paycheck. On close scrutiny, this too turns out to be complicated. Apparently federal judges are like the Pope—they don’t really “retire.” Judges (unlike the Pope?) take “senior status” which usually means a stripped-down workload, but at full pay.

It’s hard to know just how to evaluate this. I know quite a number of judges just never go senior—pretty good evidence against the efficacy of prayer, considering what a lot of lawyers must be saying about them under their breaths. For a lot of others, working (say) three months a year must seem just ideal (I’ve got a deal pretty much like that, and I love it—and come to think of it, I have reason to suspect that their spouses like it, too).

But for example purposes—suppose a judge goes on the bench at 50 and “goes senior” at 65, with an expected lifespan of 20 more years. How much would you have to add to the judge’s pay during each of those 15 years to fund a full salary for an additional 20? Plug in a (n arbitrarily chosen) 3.5 percent interest rate and you get the sum of $121,680—that’s a 73 percent topoff above his base salary (local mileage may vary). I doubt that many private pensions do that well.

There is one more glaring inconsistency in my data: I am comparing judge’s personal income with median family income. In 1967, that was probably nonproblematic—I suspect the chances that the judge’s wife (sic) in those days held a job outside the home are pretty small (the shame of it!). These days, I suspect that most judges' spouses (sic) do work—and that a good many of them are high-priced professionals with incomes three-four-five times the income of the judge (the rule of The Millionaire Next Door—every household needs one entrepreneur and one good government paycheck). So a true family-family comparison might show a much wider gap.

Still, we come back to the stark fact that the Federal judge these days makes about the same as a beginning associate at a fancy firm. But I wonder how the judge does compared to the median income for lawyers?—and how that comparison works, matching today against 1967? I know that when I came out of law school, a lot of lawyers were not doing very well. And even today—forget about Wachtell, Lipton, et al., I know from experience that an awful lot of lawyers are practicing law in their terrycloth bathrobes at the kitchen counter. That might explain why, even in this attenuated market, even as the occasional judge leaves the bench to be, say, a law school dean—still, the list of highly promising aspirants remains quite long. It’s a little like the shirt-making factory: why expect to earn more than minimum wage when there is a whole row of fungible replacements in plastic chairs out in the hall, just waiting to take your place?