Perhaps We Should Pay Federal Circuit Judges More

Scott Baker’s article takes a creative approach to the question of whether the federal judiciary should receive a pay raise and concludes that the data counsel otherwise.1 While I am a great advocate of empirical analysis to inform questions such as this, and Professor Baker may have done the best job possible with the available measures, I fear that this study contributes little to the debate and cannot support its author’s conclusions. The available tools to measure the effects of lower pay and judicial performance are so extremely crude they cannot tell us much. Perhaps more significant, Baker’s failure to prove that judicial pay does matter, given the limitations of the available measures, provides no evidence that it does not matter. I think it makes far more sense, given the lack of reliable measures, to rely on basic economic intuition and more direct anecdotal experience.