Judicial Compensation in New York: A National Perspective, Report

REPORT TO THE CHIEF JUDGE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK 17
IV.
JUDICIAL SALARIES: A NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
THE 50 STATES HAVE EXPERIMENTED with a wide variety of processes to set and review
judicial salaries. This section of the report summarizes the national experience.
A. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Most states as well as the federal government have found it difficult to settle on a
broadly accepted method for adjusting judicial salaries in a regular, equitable, objective,
and nonpolitical manner. As the American Bar Association (ABA) recently found,
and New York’s experience confirms, the most difficult problem is the politicization of
the process: “Tension between the legislative and judicial branches over the issue of
appropriate levels of compensation for judges is a recurrent theme in state governments
across the country.” 32 These problems became acute in the 1960s and 1970s,
prompting the ABA to establish in 1985 a Committee on State Judicial Salaries, which
issued a Handbook on State Judicial Salaries delineating specific criteria which should
justify judicial compensation levels. The ABA House of Delegates subsequently
approved Standards for Judicial Compensation in 1990. 33 The most relevant standards
for purposes of this report are:
• The level of compensation must be high enough to attract competent and highly
qualified lawyers to seek judicial office.
• The level of compensation should be reviewed and adjusted on a regular, periodic
basis to assure that it remains high enough to retain able and experienced judges on
the bench. 34
States have adopted three main approaches: reliance on the traditional legislative
appropriation process; permanent compensation commissions either for judges exclusively
or for all three branches of government; and automatic “escalators” that raise
judicial salaries in tandem with one or more indices to maintain the real (inflation
adjusted) value of judicial compensation. The latter two approaches are more recent
and reflect efforts to avoid the pitfalls inherent in the legislative appropriation process.
A growing number of states have come to rely on compensation commissions to
reduce the influence of politics on judicial salary decisions. Such commissions typically
adopt and apply objective criteria, such as the judicial pay in other states and the
federal government, the pay received by public sector lawyers, private sector lawyers,
law school deans and professors, local government officials and employees, and various
cost-of-living indices. An important impetus for turning the task of setting judi-
32 ABA Standing Committee on Judicial Independence, Report and Recommendation, Approved on April 12, 2003.
33 Judicial Administration Division’s Lawyers Conference Committee on Judicial Compensation.
34 American Bar Association, Judicial Division, Standards for Judicial Compensation. Chicago: American Bar
Association, 1990.