Richard, you ask “What, exactly, is [my]objection to paying federal judges more than first-year associates?”

I thought I had made it plain in posts over the last year that I have no objection to any particular salary being paid to federal judges. What I object to is unpersuasive argument. And Chief Justice Roberts doesn’t have a persuasive case that judges are currently paid too little to attract good people to the federal bench.

In the fourth link I provided in yesterday’s post, I noted that the Chief objects that ”federal district judges’ salaries are exceeded by wet-behind-the-ears associates at the great urban law firms.” I went on to mention that one of my correspondents ”suggests that judicial salaries could be legislated to automatically stay ahead of such a rate—although calculation formulae for such a metric could be controversial (whose salaries are in the equation? which law firms?).” Then I said:

I don’t think that competitiveness with other professional sectors in the law can ever be the proper objective of judicial salary legislation. The public treasury cannot be expected to keep pace with private market forces. And I don’t think the linkage to congressional and executive-branch pay scales has been a bad thing. It’s hard to say with a straight face that the work of a district judge is “worth more” than that of a House member. The downside is that judicial pay then gets held hostage to the fits of self-denial in which members of Congress occasionally feel obliged, by politics, to indulge. But I wouldn’t object to, say, $250,000 salaries for the lowest ranking federal judges if that were also a rank-and-file House member’s salary.

The more I think about it, the less I am disposed to de-coupling congressional and judicial salaries. Once the federal government starts trying to compete with the private sector in salaries (a competition it can’t win), we’re in for a widening gap between the lifestyles of patrician judges and plebeian congressmen. And as I said in another post, it’s the congressmen who often have the expense of maintaining two homes on what they’re paid.