Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Scalia Index Proves it:
Federal Judges Happy With Pay

I see that Justice Scalia believes that the rate at which innocent people are convicted of felonies is 0.027 percent (link). He arrives at this number through dividing the number of overturned murder and rape convictions by the number of all convictions. By the same logic, I can compute an index of dissatisfied Federal judges: I divide the number who have left the bench against the number of all lawyers. I come up with a dissastisfaction rate of 10 to the minus 0.03447 +/- three billion, which looks like “pretty happy” to me.

[Responding to critics: yes, not all lawyers are not Federal judges. But there is no indication that non-lawyer judges would be dissatisfied if they were Federal judges, so I might as well shovel them into the denominator. Note also that all my numbers are plucked out of the air. Scalia’s are not, but might as well be.]

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