The Moran Report – Politics, Business, Life

The following review of my book, Justice in America: How it Works – How it Fails, is from Kirkus Reviews, an independent book review company from Austin, Texas. It was reviewed on September 30, 2011. The book was published on July 16, 2011 by Coddington Press.. It has also been reviewed quite favorably by a number of people on amazon.com.

The goddess of justice is blind—and deaf and very often dumb—according to this savvy critique of the American legal system. Moran, a lawyer, journalist and founding editor of The New York Jury Verdict Reporter, knows firsthand the problems that plague American jurisprudence, and isn’t afraid to point fingers. Topping his rogue’s gallery  are “incompetent idiots” on the bench, including justices of the peace who don’t even need a high-school diploma to throw people in jail and trial judges who fall asleep during testimony. (And no, that won’t get your conviction overturned, Moran notes, unless you can prove the judge slept through something important.) Then there are the personal injury lawyers who cast about for deep pockets to sue no matter how dubious the liability, the attorneys who rake in millions from class-action suits that net their “clients” a few dollars each, the jurors—like Moran’s uncle—who base verdicts on off-the-wall theories instead of the evidence, the legislators who craft stupid laws and Supreme Court justices who uphold them based on tortured readings of the Interstate Commerce Clause. (Not always in contempt of court, Moran does allow that, often enough, judges are underpaid and conscientious, lawyers careful and upright and malpractice suits well-founded.) The author sets his indictment against a lucid outline of basic legal concepts and court procedures and nuanced discussions of everything from the propriety of electing judges to the mortgage-foreclosure robo-signing scandals. Moran writes in an entertaining, wised-up style, his punchy prose laced with black humor and an inexhaustible supply of anecdotes. His free-wheeling arguments shade from law into politics and beyond, as he enters a sweeping condemnation of a litigious society bound up in red tape because of liability fears, takes swipes at the New Deal regulatory state and even throws soup at snooty French waiters. It’s a bit over-stuffed, but Moran’s street-cred, irreverent wit and gift for translating legal arcana into laymen’s terms make for a persuasive brief. A lively, brash, illuminating insider’s look at the law, by a compelling expert witness.

Kirkus Indie, Kirkus Media LLC, 6411 Burleson Rd., Austin, TX 78744 indie@kirkusreviews.com

There is an ongoing debate in America about how we select judges. The Missouri Plan, which originated in that state in 1940, was a break from the traditional American system of popular election of judges. It is also known as the merit selection plan. A judge is nominated by a selection committee, and the governor picks from the list and makes the appointment. After one term, the judge then runs for a retention election before the voters. The idea behind the Missouri Plan, which is used in about 2-dozen states, is to rinse the politics out of the judiciary. I have been critical of the Missouri Plan because it results in the opposite of what was intended: it puts more politics into the system, not less. Take a look at Missouri itself. In my book, Justice in America: How it Works – How it Fails, I point out that in 17 out of 18 consecutive judicial appointees by the state commission were democrats. If this takes the politics out of judicial selection, I’m missing something. Instead of retail politics, we have back room politics.

 On the other hand, there is the system of selecting judges by popular elections before the voters. This system, which amazes and baffles Europeans, who have a much higher regard for expert pedigree that Americans, has its flaws. First, it brings money into the game – A lot of it, especially at the level of state supreme court elections. As in any political contest, candidates are forced to spend huge amounts of time fundraising, back slapping, baby kissing, and hand wringing. In the words of an Ohio Supreme Court Justice: “I never felt so much like a hooker down by the bus station … as I did in a judicial race. Everyone interested in contributing has very specific interests. They mean to be buying a vote.”  Remember that the end result of this mess is to elevate a person to a position that requires blind impartiality. Compounding these difficulties with popular judicial elections is the fact that the average voter doesn’t have a grasp on the qualities that go into a good judge. This doesn’t mean that the average voter is ignorant, just that they have not had the experience to make the call.

 So if we want to leave politicians out of the system, as in “merit” selection, but at the same time are unhappy that voters understandably lack the qualification to pick judges, how do we pick ‘em? Mike Carroll, a lawyer from Illinois, in a Letter to the Editor of the Wall Street Journal, has come up with an idea that is worth looking at: let lawyers select judges. His idea is that the people who know the traits of a good judge are the people who are trained in the law, and who appear before judges.  Think about it. Lawyers are conservatives, moderates, and liberals. They are Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. Some are pro-plaintiff, some for the defense. What lawyers look for in judges generally are those qualities that are the hallmarks of a good judge: impartiality; even temperament; fairness; and strictness when required. Naturally, on a particular case, a lawyer doesn’t not want a fair judge, but one who is biased in favor of his client, but this is impossible to predict because lawyers don’t get to pick the judge who hears their cases. One criticism of such a plan would be that fundraisers would consist of rooms full of lawyers, checks in hand, looking for some future consideration should they have cases before that judge. But that’s exactly how it is now: rooms full of lawyers with checks. It isn’t that only lawyers are invited to these fundraisers; it‘s simply that lawyers are the ones who care. Most states have a rule that judicial candidates are not supposed to look at their donor lists. Yeah right; and kids don’t peek under the Christmas Tree.

 So if lawyers are the majority of campaign donors, doesn’t that suck the impartiality out of the system? Not if there is full public disclosure, posted on the Internet, of all campaign contributions. This is the way it’s done in New York. I once sat in on a case in Buffalo, a retrial of a personal injury lawsuit. The judge on the original trial, since retired, was on the witness stand being grilled by the plaintiff’s attorney about contributions to his campaigns from the law firm defending the case. His credibility was on the line, with the plaintiff taking the position that he was not impartial because the defense firm donated loads of dough to help get him elected. Indeed, the United States Supreme Court found, in the case of Caperton v. Massy (129 S. Ct.2252), that large amounts of money donated to a judge’s campaign can impact the judge’s impartiality, and should require him to recuse himself from a given case.  Full public disclosure can eliminate a lot of mischief. Donor lists are available to the press of course.

 But is it politically possible to have judges elected by lawyers only? Let’s face it, with popularity at the level of aluminum siding salesmen in the 1950s, lawyers are not the apple of the public’s eye. Would a legislator who introduced such a bill be putting his or her foot into a political beartrap? “My opponent wants to take away your right to vote for judges.” Nasty little sound bite, that. But like most sound bites, its brevity can mask the seriousness of the proposal.

 Having lawyers elect judges is an idea worth looking at. Maybe Mike Carroll, Esq. from Illinois is onto something. What do you think? The only way to keep a conversation going is to, well, converse. Let’s hear your thoughts.

Liberty seldom disappears in a sudden cataclysm, but erodes over time in small steps, steps that are hardly noticeable because they just become the inevitable fabric of life. A yearning for individual liberty is part of our American DNA, and is baked into the cake that we know as American Exceptionalism, a phenomenon first observed by Alexis de Tocqueville.

 But the complexities of the modern world spawn confusion, and even fear, as we try to negotiate the rapids of contemporary life. When people are fearful, they are less concerned about their yearnings for freedom, and more open to grabbing for lifelines of security to tether them to safety. Those lifelines, once the province of voluntary associations such as churches and civic associations, Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” of civil society, have been subsumed by the beneficent embrace of government. And government’s displacement of voluntary efforts has not been hostile, or even without our acquiescence. Life seems easier when government dispenses goodies to make the nasty vicissitudes of life go away. We get used to it, and worse, we get to like it.

 Are we becoming European? Don’t get me wrong; I love Europe, the Europe built centuries ago by different societies. But Europe of today, with its secular devotion to the dispensations of government, is losing its collective way, if not its mind. Americans, still possessed of a bit of the old exceptionalism, look slack jawed at the spectacle of French twenty somethings setting fire to cars in protest against the possibility that, some 40-years hence, they may get to retire on the public dole at 62 rather than 60.  In Greece a hairdresser can retire at 50 because hair dressing is considered a hazardous occupation – something to do with handling chemicals. When a government threatens to withhold some benefits, there is rioting in the streets, even though the government may have run out of, well, money. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, “The problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.” But the coddled youngsters of the continent do not want to be bothered with that reality, because it is for someone else to worry about. A 30-hour work week, one month vacation, free health care, and a public financed early retirement will do that to people. Remove the frictions of life, and you remove the challenges of life, and the desire to confront those challenges. You become docile, complacent, and witless.

 Is America ready for this?  In Europe 46% – 51million people- age 18-34 LIVE WITH THEIR PARENTS. This is a society that syncs with our American notions of exceptionalism? When dependency replaces ambition, the vacuum is filled with not only more dependency, but a sense of entitlement to being dependent.  We see small rumblings of this in America. In Wisconsin, workers, including teachers with masters and doctoral degrees, took over the statehouse because they were being asked to pay for part of their health insurance. The horror.

 The Code of Federal Regulations, the Federal administrative book that tells us how to live our lives, is over 157,000 pages and growing. And it is not only the federal government that is calling the shots. Bill Clinton announced in the 1990s that “the era of big government is over.” And the tooth fairy will leave you a present under your pillow. Small government, right down to the village level, is doing its best to help big government make life “easier.” Mark Steyn, in his new book After America, refers to this phenomenon as a” web of micro-tyrannies which, in their overbearing pettiness, ensnare you at every turn.”

 To the extent that we empower government to make our lives blissful, we empower government to control our lives. As Ronald Reagan said it so well: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” What are your thoughts?

Copyright©2011 by Russell F. Moran

Parts of this article are excerpted from Justice in America: How it Works – How it Fails.

I watched the endless 9/11 tributes on TV yesterday, including the two-hour special last night – 9/11 10 Years Later, a documentary made by two French brothers who are cinematographers. The linchpin of the entire documentary was the constant scenes of the firefighters, most of whom must have known that they were trudging wearily toward their deaths. The math, which each of these guys must have known, was scary. It takes a man, loaded with equipment, about 10 minutes to climb one story. Even at a quick glance, anybody could come up with a rough estimate that the fires were at or above the 80th floor. That’s 80 floors times 10 minutes per floor or 800 minutes - over 13 hours. This was a climb into a hell of jet fuel, smoke, blood, and debris. They didn’t know that the buildings would collapse, but they did know was that jet fuel was burning furiously, and carrying deadly matter down with it.  Even if they didn’t hope to climb high enough to fight the fire, they climbed as far as they could to meet and help the people on their way down.

They had a NEED to help, not just a sense of duty, or a desire to get a job done. They needed to rescue people; it’s who they were, and it defined their lives.  This human trait of actually feeling a need to help was evident throughout the interviews with the survivors. A major reason they became firefighters was to help people, and an apparently hopeless disaster would not change that.

Our legal system doesn’t force us to help, and it shouldn’t. No law, civil or criminal, can ever replace the natural compulsion to assist people who need help. For an individual, no system of justice can make us do the right thing. You know what you have to do.

Two days after the attacks I was at lunch presiding over a Rotary Club meeting as president. I faced no danger, but I too needed to help, as did my fellow Rotarians. I urged the club to run a blood drive to help the survivors. Although I had been glued to the TV for the prior two days, I somehow didn’t get the message – or didn’t want to hear it -that there were very few survivors. A few of the club members gently pointed out to me that the last thing that was needed was blood. I felt like many a medical provider in the days after 9/11 who had manned clinics and triage centers all over the region to assist the injured. Nobody came – they were dead.

We need to help; it’s in our makeup, and nothing is more frustrating, or sadder, than to feel the need even though it is pointless.  Admiral Chester Nimitz once said: “God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right, even though I think it is hopeless.” He thought the Battle of Midway might be hopeless. We won the battle.

Tonight my wife is going to a meeting of our church committee help assign parishoners to various charitable outreach tasks, such as Thanksgiving baskets for the needy. She is extremely busy, but she needs to help, and so do I. I told her to just assign me to wherever I can best fit in. Answering the need to help rounds us out as human beings, arguable makes us human beings. When you feel the need to help, don’t resist it.

The sanctity of the jury deliberation room has an almost religious aura in our history.  The jurors receive their instructions or “charge” from the judge, explaining their job and the law.  They are then on their own, with no official watching over them.  If they have a question, they can ask it of the judge, but they are in charge of their own decision on the facts.  No words can say it better than the classic movie Twelve Angry Men, where Henry Fonda’s character persuades the contrary group that they should carefully sift through the evidence and not jump to a conclusion.  The defendant was charged with first degree murder. Henry Fonda’s efforts resulted in acquitting the criminal defendant rather than sentencing him to death.  The film is inspiring, and it reminds one of how the American jury system can work so well. 

It also reminds me of how the system can sometimes break down.  A dear late uncle of mine was a delightful guy, but did suffer from being opinionated – in spite of the facts.  Over dinner he told me excitedly about his recent jury duty on a personal injury case. At the time I was the publisher of The New York Jury Verdict Reporter.  The lawsuit involved a woman in a department store walking down the aisle looking at a rack of dresses.  She testified that she tripped over a raised electrical box on the floor, causing her to fall and suffer injuries.  There were no eyewitnesses.  It was her testimony that the box protruded a foot or so into the aisle from the platform holding the dress rack. There was no contrary evidence to dispute her claim of where the box was placed.  The jury found in favor of the department store, determining that there was no negligence on its part.  “From what you told me, it seems to me that her story was pretty believable,” I said.  “Why did you find in favor of the store, especially because nobody disputed her explanation of the facts?”  Uncle, who prided himself on being a handy man and well versed in matters technical, was able to convince his fellow jurors that: “No tradesman could be so dumb as to leave an electrical box in the middle of the floor.  They always recess them in the platform.”  When I explained to uncle that plaintiff’s story was the evidence, and not his theory, he again explained that no tradesman could be so dumb as to leave the box in the middle of the floor.  So uncle and his colleagues made their decision on imaginary facts – not the facts in evidence at the trial – but the facts as conjured up by uncle and his fellow jurors.  Jury deliberations stay in the jury room and only come out when there is objective reason to suspect jury misbehavior.  The judge in that case had nothing to decide: he wasn’t aware that new “evidence” was created in the jury room.  This is also known as jury nullification: the jury comes to a decision despite the evidence. The poor woman who went splat went home empty-handed, because of uncle’s “evidence.” I refused to publish that case in The New York Jury Verdict Reporter.

This article is exerpted from my book Justice in America: How it Works – How it Fails. https://www.createspace.com/3637622

My mother died last year at the age of 95, after a decades long descent into terminal dementia. I was her only nearby relative, although I was constantly in touch with my brother who was overseas with the State Department.  He basically turned over the decision-making to me, the person on the spot.

Mom’s last 2 weeks of life smacked me in the face with something I only read about in the papers, the great debate over the End of Life and health care rationing. Mom’s health began to falter sharply, and she shuttled back and forth from the nursing home to the affiliated hospital. As the named person on her health Care Proxy, I was the one who had to make the calls.

A tough young social worker from the nursing home pulled me aside and said: “Schmuck, it’s time you faced something – your Mom is dying. Are you planning to prevent that?” Only a friend can talk to a friend like that, and we had indeed become friends over a couple of days.  She convinced me that a Final Care Committee (I think that was the name of it) be convened. The committee consisted of the hospital administrator, the head of nursing, Mom’s attending physician, and my tough little social worker friend. There was even a person on the committee called an ombudsman, the guy in charge of serving as the advocate for my mother, the patient.

The discussion at the meeting had one goal: to assist me to decide the course of treatment for Mom; palliative care or regular care. Never once in th meeting did I feel pressure to make a decision one way or the other, but the right choice became clear: Mom should be made to feel as comfortableas possible, be given palliative care, and let nature take its course. 

My comfort in having come to a decision didn’t last long. When I visited her after the meeting the first thing I noticed was that she was off telemetry, that scary video monitor that shows pulse, respiration, etc. I raced to the nursing station to point out this glaring error. Trained to deal with strung out next-of-kin, the nurse explained to me, with the kindest diplomacy I ever encountered, that telemetry was irrelevant, because I had decided to “let Mom die.”

Let Mom die. The very phrase filled me with coldness, because I suddenly had a power I never wanted, a power over life and death of my own mother. I could have been a completely self-serving idiot – and believe me, the thought occurred to me - and opted for regular care, meaning that heroic efforts would have been made to keep Mom alive. But the good folks at the hospital, as well as my wife and brother, helped me to make what I now know was the right decision: let Mom die.

My wife was faced with a similar set of circumstances with the lingering death of her 89 year-old mother 3 years ago. Lynda was an only child, so hers was a lonely perch indeed

My decision had nothing to do with economics. Mom was on Medicare and Medicaid, so any financial thoughts would have been academic. Believe me, when your Mom is dying, you do not think about the economic impact of end-of-life care on the economy as a whole. But we should think about it, especally as baby boomers like myself continue to gray and fall prey to a rainbow of ailments. A statistic that never seems to change is that 30% of all Medicare dollars is spent in the last year of life. Medical technology now enables us to add months of life for a person stricken with any number of maladies, including cancer. Months.

The idea of  government imposed health rationing, death panels in the heated rhetoric of the debate, disturbs me. But this article is not intended to engage the great debate, not here anyway. My purpose is to talk to you, who is probably reading this because the issues I’m talking about confront you now.  No, I’m not looking to educate you -  a term we hear often – I’m looking to reach out my hand to you, and share with you my trying experience, and let you know that you’re not alone. Your loved one is just that; so make your decision with love, and you can’t go wrong. Sometimes the best thing to do is to let Mom die.

The real estate bubble of the early 2000s followed closely on the heels of the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.  Will we ever learn? Probably not.  In 1637 in Holland, tulips – yes the flower – became the object of a speculative frenzy.  This became known as Tulip Mania or Tulipomania. The prices of the bulbs began to skyrocket, aided by an early version of a derivatives market, where an investor would buy futures contracts on bulbs not yet planted. At one point the price for a single bulb exceeded the annual income of a skilled craftsman by 10 times.  And, as with any speculative bubble, the prices eventually crashed. Although it has become a subject of debate among economists as to just how severe the tulip mania was, the story nevertheless stands as a metaphor for speculative excess. 

 It’s getting tedious listening to politicians carping about victims.  A victim means a heartbreaking story, and a heartbreaking story means a press conference, and a press conference means valuable vote-getting face-time for the politician.  Remember the great Mighty Mouse: “Here I come to save the day!”  Mighty Mouse would feel comfortable in Congress. These trying times are less about injustices and predators and victims, and more about a nation of people who didn’t want to hit the slow button. We were all too busy enjoying the party that we didn’t notice the house was on fire.

 So while the newspapers and TV specials talk about the injustice of this mess – and a story about Mr. and Mrs. Jones from Dubuque who are facing the loss of their home makes for compelling copy – the truth is a lot more complicated.

 Meanwhile, I’m putting my money in tulips.

This article has been excerpted from my book Justice in America – How it Works – How it Fails. https://www.createspace.com/3637622

On May 2, 2011, I posted an article about the death of Osma bin Laden. I discussed the idea that justice is a need, not a simple legal construction to make things orderly. Like food and water, we have a human need for justice, and without it we sense a longing for something that is missing. If we compare the bin Laden operation to other “justice-as -need” events we can see some similarities, which all go to prove that justice is, indeed, something we need. The OJ Simpson murder trial that resulted in an acquittal is a case in point. I don’t believe that I’m stretching a point to say that Simpson was obviously guilty of murdering his ex-wife and her male companion. The evidence was overwhelming, but the jury choose to acquit, based on a perfectly legal function we know as jury nullification, which simply means that the jury made a choice in spite of the evidence. The nation was dumfounded. The months following the Simpson acquittal demonstrated that we were missing something: a murderer went free. ”How could something like this happen?” we all asked. The TV talking heads were fully employed, trying to make sense of it. Of course, members of OJ’s Dream Team of defenders took to the air waves and turned themselves inside out trying to explain that their client had been  justly exonerated. But that’s what good lawyers do – they represent their client. You wouldn’t have expected F. Lee Bailey to get on the air and say: “We got lucky, and our guy got off.” No, he fulminated about the bungling of the LA Police Department, not without some truth, and how justice was done. But those of us who didn’t represent Simpson knew that the legal system may have worked (the jury, after all is in charge of finding the facts), but that justice had not been done. Our need for justice was somewhat served when he was found liable in the civil lawsuit against him by Nicole’s and Ron Goldman’s families. That he was later found guilty of kidnap and grand larceny in a totally unrelated case is not at all relevant: He was acquitted of murder, and that he is now in jail for another crime may help our sense of justice a bit, in that a bad guy is now behind bars.

The Casey Anthony case was entirely different, but the justice-as-need  milieu was on display as perhaps we have never before seen. Twitter, Facebook and the whole phenomenon of social media didn’t exist in 1995, the year of Simpson’s acquittal, but was deeply engrained in our culture in July, 2011 when a jury found her not guilty of the murder, manslaughter or aggravated abuse of her child, Caylee. 

The Simpson case and the Anthony case couldn’t have been more different, as I have discussed before. The evidence in the Anthony case was difficult to say the least, with the prosecution unable to show a murder weapon, or even a cause of death. But our human need for justice was on display on Twitter and Facebook, and it wasn’t pretty. I am a devotee of Twitter, and the days after the Anthony verdict were startling. A lot of people tweeted things that I bet they wished they could retract. Some of the tweets were almost bloodthirsty in their anger over the young mother’s acquittal.

But the system did work in the Anthony case. It is not a goal of the criminal justice system to make us all feel a collective good over a verdict. No, the purpose of a criminal trial is to challenge a jury to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, or to find the defendant not-guilty. I do not say “innocent,” I say not guilty, a big difference. In the A Scottish courts the verdict would have been “Not Proven,” a more satisfying phrase, because it means that the prosecution has  just not done its job in proving guilt. So our need for justice may not have been quenched with the Anthony verdict. The woman may be a despicable monster – I think that a failure to report a child’s absence for over a month qualifies one for monsterhood – but that is not the point. She was on trial to answer for the death of the child, whether murder, manslaughter or child abuse. She was not on trial for being a horrible person. 

Fox journalist Greta Van Susteren conducted an incredible interview with the jury foreman in the Anthony case. You should watch the interview. With a calm intelligence, “Juror 11″ explained why they found that the prosecution did not make its case. We still may not be happy, but our need for justice will be somewhat satisfied, if only a little.

In a recent post, and in my book, Justice in America, I discussed the idea that justice is something that we need as human beings, just as we need food and water. The aftermath of the Casey Anthony murder trial has left the country parched, angry, and confused. For three years the talking heads of television were united behind one theme: that Casey Anthony was guilty of a heinous crime, and it was the jury’s job only to determine if it was first degree murder, child abuse or manslaughter. The trial lasted for more than a month.

 The case mesmerized the nation. Caylee Anthony, an adorable little 2-year old, goes missing. It is one month before her mother, defendant Casey Anthony, even reports her child’s absence to the police. The case was entirely circumstantial. The child’s remains were discovered 6 months after she was reported missing, so long after death that there was no reliable DNA evidence. The defense argued that Caylee’s death could have been accidental, and constructed a story that she may have drowned in a swimming pool at her grandparents’ house, and that the grandfather could have taken the body and tossed it into the woods to cover up the accident. The prosecution argued, to the satisfaction of the punditry anyway, that nobody would try to cover up an accident by making it look like a murder.

 After 11 hours the jury returned a verdict, finding Anthony not guilty of first degree murder, which could have brought her the death penalty, not guilty of aggravated manslaughter, and not guilty of aggravated child abuse. She was convicted on four counts of lying to law enforcement officials, with a maximum prison sentence of one year per count. This morning, the judge sentenced her to one year in prison on each of the 4 counts. After adjustments for time served (3 years) and good behavior while in prison, she will be released from custody in 6 days.

 The case has been compared to the OJ Simpson murder trial in 1995. OJ Simpson, celebrity ex-football star and broadcaster, was tried for the murder of his ex-wife and a companion. He was let free after a jury found him not guilty. I think any comparison between the Anthony case and the Simpson case is deeply flawed. It is safe to say that the Simpson jury simply ignored a mountain of evidence and rendered a verdict that was contrary to the facts. The Anthony case, on the other hand, can be viewed as a jury that simply accepted the duty that the judge gave them. The issue before them was not whether Casey Anthony was a terrible mother or a self-absorbed bitch. The issue, simply, was whether the prosecution proved that she caused the child’s death – beyond a reasonable doubt. The prosecution was not able to prove the cause of death, a critical problem. Nor was the prosecution able to establish a motive for the child’s death. Motive is not legally required, but it is usually a key element in the state’s case. Here they could provide no evidence of motive. One of the jurors told journalist Diane Sawyer: “I did not say she was innocent,” she said. “I just said there was not enough evidence. If you cannot prove what the crime was, you cannot determine what the punishment should be.” 

 Was justice served? That question will linger in our minds for a long time.

On June 28, Fox News departed from its usual balanced coverage and ran a segment aimed at the Justices of the United States Supreme Court for departing on their annual 3 month vacation. The piece pointed out that the justices receive pension and health benefits from the American taxpayer. The reporter, Griff Jenkins, then went on to recount the justice’s travel plans, and then conducted a “man in the street” set of interviews with avegage folks who thought a 3 month vacation sounded like a lot.

 This is a cheap shot to say the least. By any objective measure the pay for a Supreme Court judge is modest. The Chief Justice makes $223,500 per year and the associate justices earn $213,900. These are not pauper wages to be sure, but when viewed in light of the job requirements, the pay is modest. Any of these talented individuals could have stayed in the private practice of law and earned over $1 million as a senior partner in a law firm. They could have opted for academia, where a senior professor earns on average $330,000 per year, or as a dean where the average is $430,000. Perhaps they might have been tempted to use their judicial talents as a TV personality. Judge Judy earns over $45 million per year.

The Fox piece also focused on the question of the constitutionality of the Obamacare health legislation, questioning whether it was proper to take a 3 month vacation when such a critical issue is banging its way through the federal courts, inevitably headed toward the Supreme Court. But there is never a time in history when some important issue might wind up on the court’s docket.
To carry Jenkins’ logic to its conclusion, the justices should never take a vacation. In 2003 the National Commission on the Public Service issued a report entitled “Urgent Business for America: Revitalizing the Federal Government for the 21st Century.” The commission, named for former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, consisted of some of the best and brightest minds in the nation. It found that federal judicial salaries were alarmingly low and recommended an “immediate and substantial increase in judicial salaries.” That was 8 years ago. Never happened. If there is one thing this country needs it is a talentedjudiciary. The judicial profession should not be a place to earn big bucks, but it should at least pay a salary in keeping with the demands of the job. Parts of this article have been excerpted from my book Justice in America – How it Works – How it Fails. https://www.createspace.com/3637622