Following up on this week’s posts (here, here, and here) on how law faculty salaries stack up to federal judicial salaries:  Ben Winograd asks on the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog:  Judicial Pay — Are Judges Being Selective with the Evidence?. 

After adjusting for inflation, wages [in 1969] ranged from nearly $220,000 for district judges to $343,000 for Chief Justice Warren Burger. By comparison, in 2006, district judges made $165,200, while Chief Justice John Roberts made $212,100. The 1969 figures mark the highest inflation-adjusted wages for federal judges since the advent of the Consumer Price Index in 1913, which might help explain why Chief Justice Roberts – along with other proponents of higher judicial salaries – have used the year as a baseline to discuss current compensation levels, among other arguments.

“Like any good advocate, Chief Justice Roberts picked an advantageous comparison date — 1969 — to make a compelling case for lagging judicial pay,” says Paul Caron, a professor at the University of Cincinnati School of Law and the author of the Tax Prof Blog. “It is far more powerful to say that judicial pay is 25%-40% below the 1969 benchmark than to admit that federal judges today earn within a few thousand dollars of their inflation-adjusted median salary over the past forty years.”

“Obviously it appears that he cherry-picked the best possible year to make his case,” added Northwestern Law Professor Steven Lubet, who closely follows the federal judiciary.