Clarence Thomas was mired in debt – and fuming over what he considered an inadequate salary for a Supreme Court justice. Sitting next to a Republican House member on a plane ride home from a conference at a Georgia beach resort in January 2000, Thomas raised the issue and suggested that resignations would ensue without a raise.
Widely aired in conservative circles, Thomas’s financial grievances, as outlined in a new report by ProPublica, might have helped inspire the largesse that flowed his way from Texas billionaire Harlan Crow and other wealthy supporters. “The job is not worth doing for what they pay,” Thomas would say at a speech the next year, and he pressed repeatedly to lift the ban, imposed in 1989, on justices’ accepting honoraria for speeches.
His complaints explain – although they in no way justify – Thomas’s acceptance of tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of dollars’ worth of luxury travel and other benefits from conservative benefactors. But – and here is a sentence I am not accustomed to writing – Thomas has a point. Supreme Court justices, and their colleagues on the lower federal courts, ought to be paid more.
This might not be a welcome message if, like me, you are infuriated by the court’s recent lurch to the right. The point, though, isn’t about pay for performance; indeed, the Constitution explicitly protects federal judges from having their compensation lowered during their tenure in office.
And it isn’t about ordinary issues of supply and demand. Federal judgeships are at the apex of the pyramid of prestige for lawyers. Some potential nominees might decide the relatively modest federal salary that comes with the post isn’t tolerable; some serving judges might choose to return to the private sector after some time on the bench. But there isn’t conclusive evidence of such a troubling trend.
Whatever the salary, there will always be more highly qualified applicants than slots available, certainly at the Supreme Court. No one is turning down a Supreme Court nomination because the job doesn’t pay enough – and, Thomas’s reported bellyaching notwithstanding, no one seems to be quitting for that reason, either.
And to be clear, these aren’t pauper’s wages. The chief justice is earning $298,500 this year, associate justices $285,400. Federal appeals court judges make $246,600, and trial court judges $232,600. The median wage for a full-time worker in the United States is about $60,000.
Still, that’s not the proper benchmark. Consider that young lawyers fresh off a Supreme Court clerkship can join big law firms and pocket signing bonuses approaching $500,000 – that on top of salaries around $300,000. That doesn’t include year-end bonuses.
Meanwhile, federal district court judges are making the same as first-year lawyers at major firms. That’s just not right – although it’s true that a judicial salary goes a lot further in North Dakota than it does in Manhattan. And it’s not necessary. The chief justice of Canada earns about $370,000, other justices about $340,000.
The lawyers who regularly appear before the justices make many multiples of what the jurists they face earn. Profits per partner at top law firms in recent years were as high as $8.4 million – and the biggest names can rake in more. Justices are human, and the disparity rankles. It’s never going to be eliminated, and it shouldn’t be.
But it’s not too much to say that justices’ salaries should be comparable to those of, for instance, law school deans. Most of the current justices have spent the bulk of their careers in public service or academia, not amassing significant wealth before ascending to the bench. Some justices, including Thomas, can command seven-figure book deals, arrangements that can spawn their own ethical questions.
Federal employees as a rule are past due for a bump in pay. Two decades ago, a commission on public service headed by former Federal Reserve Board Chair Paul A. Volcker concluded that judicial salaries “are the most egregious example of the failure of federal compensation policies,” having lost 24 percent of their purchasing power since 1969. Today, those numbers range from 30 percent for lower-court judges to 40% for justices.
Thomas ought to have behaved better. But he, and his brethren, ought to be paid better, too.
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