![handle is hein.journals/oyzoyz17 and id is 1 raw text is:
The Bulletin of the Judicial Administration Division
oy 4ez!
VOL. 17, NO. 1
FEBRUARY 1974
CHAIRMAN'S COLUMN
AliceL. O'Donnell
Washington, D.C.
In this issue I should like to address my column
to one of the most serious problems facing the
judiciary today. The subject is money.
In recent months, as my
Division activities have stepped
up, I have been in touch
through correspondence and
attendance at meetings with
hundreds of judges, state and
federal. In my position at the
Federal Judicial Center, we
daily are in contact with some
of the 600 federal judges we
serve. The subject of judicial Alice L. O'Donnell
salaries, I assure you, is very much on their minds.
In the state system, where some general jurisdic-
tion trial judges receive less than $15,000 per year,
complaints are often based on comparisons with
salaries of their counterparts in the federal service
who get $40,000 per year. Writes one judge who sits on
a state court in the midwest: You will find around
the country almost every state trial judge has a federal
district court judge sitting in close proximity to him,
and he is doing every bit as much work as the federal
judge and in many cases much more. I would be
happy to compare my case load with the federal judge
who sits one block from my courthouse and receives
$40,000 against my $26,000. Though comparisons
are sometimes odious, they are also sometimes
helpful; and this judge takes a stand one cannot argue
against.
Another state judge recently wrote to me com-
menting on our last issue of Oyez! Oyez! and a news
story which reported that one of the states had now
raised the pay of their judges. He wrote: The article
bespeaks volumes on the sad state of judicial salaries
when it recites that it is good news to learn that judges
in a state have now received a pay raise from $25,000
to $26,000. It should make every lawyer blush-not
only at the insignificance of the raise, but at the base
salary for judges of the highest courts of a sovereign
state. The 'raise' is reminiscent of Mr. Justice
Jackson's famous dictum: 'A munificent bequest in a
pauper's will'.
oye~z!
Justice Paul Reardon of the Supreme Judicial
Court of Massachusetts, addressing our Division at its
annual meeting in 1972, made poignant reference to
this state-federal salary imbalance, citing three in-
stances where outstanding state judges had left the
state bench to join the federal system, strictly because
of the higher salary. Said Justice Reardon: . . . It is
not a progressive circumstance when a consequent
drain builds up from the state to the federal judiciary
of able and dedicated judges of long service in the
states simply because their state remuneration does
not afford them enough to raise and educate their
families. One cannot fault in the least a state Chief
Justice of many years' experience for departing the
work he knows and loves to become a federal District
Court judge at a salary about twice that which his
state views as his worth, translated in those terms.
Judge Ruggero J. Aldisert, of the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Third Circuit, in a law school lecture
delivered this year, referred to Mr. Justice Reardon's
speech and agreed with the Justice that the states have
failed their judges in many ways, thus bringing about
a growing denigration of the state courts and their
functions in the public mind. Judge Aldisert queries
his readers with hortatory words which ask: Where
will the federal judiciary drift when state governors,
legislators and [other state] administrators abdicate
their basic responsibilities...?
The Chief Justice of the United States has very
often addressed his remarks to the matter of judicial
salaries. As recently as last August, when addressing
the opening assembly of the American Bar Associa-
tion, he compared the federal judges' salaries with
those of employees in private industry and those of the
classified federal employees. He pointed out that the
federal judges have received no increase in compensa-
tion for a five-year period whereas the classified
federal employees have been increased one-third, in
addition to receiving increases based on years of
service or promotion in grade. To quote the Chief
Justice: This failure to provide fairly for judges'
compensation will make it increasingly difficult to
prevail on the best of our experienced litigation
lawyers to take federal judicial appointments-and
we must not settle for less than the best. Yet, while
the Chief Justice's words were still resounding, at least
three federal judges were drafting letters to the Presi-
dent saying they could no longer serve on the federal](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/oyzoyz17&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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