Wallace Jefferson, the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, spent the first half of his first speech to the Texas Legislature telling lawmakers they need to raise salaries or get used to high turnover and a lower grade of judgesJefferson, who left a San Antonio law firm to wear the black robes of a judge, said judges who leave the courts are leaving, in part, because the pay is so much better for private-sector lawyers than for judges. "... if we ask judges to sacrifice too much, Texas will be left with without the experienced judiciary that it surely deserves. Today, we are asking too much," he said. He said Texas ranked 5th in judicial pay in the 1980s, but has dropped to 39th now.
It's fair to wonder why a guy making $115,000 a year is griping about his paycheck. By way of comparison, the average resident of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area made $40,915, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. But while top judges make almost three times what average Texans make, they say they could double or triple their salaries by leaving the bench for jobs in the private sector.
Comptroller
Carole Keeton Strayhorn had her staff do some work on this for a report issued in December. The average judge on the state's top appeals courts -- the Supremes, the court of criminal appeals and the 14 regional appellate courts -- lasts less than one term on the job, according to the comptroller. She recommended a pay raise, but stopped short of blaming salaries for the high turnover and said lawmakers should get someone to develop "reliable data" on the reasons appeals judges don't stick around and to find out whether that's really a problem.
The National Center for State Courts did a survey in October 2003 and found the average judge at Jefferson's level was making $130,221; the low-high numbers were $95,000 and $191,483. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice
William Rehnquist was making $201,000 at that point. And the pay in Texas was the lowest among the ten largest states in the U.S.; California was first, followed by Michigan, New Jersey, Illinois, and New York.
The comptroller looked at some other state jobs, too. The Texas chief justice makes less than 103 state psychiatrists, 10 agency commissioners, 66 doctors, 10 agency directors and executive directors, and six agency lawyers. But it's cheap at the top: Among statewide elected officials, only Gov.
Rick Perry made more than Jefferson in 2004.
And then there are the lawyers. The average Texas lawyer made $117,870 in 2003, according to the Labor Department. A 2001 study done by the State Bar of Texas found private practice lawyers with 21 to 25 years of experience were making an average of $147,916 each year. At the time of that study, the average Supreme Court justice in Texas had been a licensed lawyer for 23 years. Big law firms paid the most, a median of $250,000. Average first-year salaries for grads of the University of Texas law school have been over $100,000 for the last several years.
Several bills have been filed to raise the pay of judges. Sen.
Robert Duncan, R-Lubbock, and Rep.
Vilma Luna, D-Corpus Christi, would raise state district judge pay to $125,000 by September 2006. Intermediate appellate judges would get 110 percent of that, or $137,500, and pay for top appeals judges would peg at 120 percent, or $150,000. They'd also unlink the retirement pay of legislators and the pay of district judges. Instead, the retirement pay of lawmakers would be pegged to the governor's salary.
The pitch for pay was part of Jefferson's first "State of the Judiciary" speech to lawmakers. His predecessor,
Tom Phillips, used the forum to promote changes to judicial selection -- reforms driven generally by the idea that it's unseemly for judges to run for office using money that comes in large part from the lawyers who argue before them. Jefferson didn't mention the subject.
After pay, he talked about technology, indigent defense and access to justice. He said he wants to increase public access to electronic court records and wants to make arguments in cases before the Supreme Court available on the Internet, through some of the same streaming video tricks that now make it possible to watch legislative proceedings. You can see the whole speech at this link:
www.texasweekly.com/Documents/SOTJ2005.pdf.