Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Guest columnist Dan Polsenberg: Judges not paid their fair share

Dan Polsenberg is a local attorney with the law firm of Beckley Singleton.

Judicial pay is a crisis. According to the American and Federal Bar Associations, the lack of judicial pay raises causes good candidates to forgo appointments and current judges to leave their posts.

The situation is even more unfair in Nevada's courts. Our state constitution limits pay increases in the middle of a term. Because judges have staggered terms, however, some get raises years after others. Gov. Kenny Guinn's blue-ribbon commission recognizes this inequity and recommends equalizing the pay.

The best example of the unfairness is Bob Rose, who has been on the Nevada Supreme Court since 1989. When Rose was chief justice from 1999 to this January, he shepherded the judiciary through a highly productive time, streamlining processes and making new rules to hold the court system more accountable. "More bang for the buck" was how Justice Rose phrased it.

Although he was the highest-ranking judicial officer in the state, ironically he was Nevada's lowest paid full-time urban judge. He was making $85,000 a year in base salary when every other justice was being paid $107,000, all because of this glitch in the state constitution.

Although the Sun's March 21 editorial states that Justice Rose knew of the salary situation when he took the job, that is just not true. For 40 years all justices were paid the same until the law was changed in 1995.

The Sun's editorial also argued that there is "no reason why judges" should be treated differently from the governor or members of the Legislature. Actually, there is. Judges are different. They only decide the cases that come before them. They have no control over their salaries, which are set by the Legislature and the governor. While it makes sense to limit raises for legislative and executive officials, such a limitation for judges results only in unfairness.

If the Legislature provides a pay raise this session, five of the seven justices on the court will spend part of their terms working for disproportionately lower salaries. Two justices elected in 2002 will get a raise the next January, but the others will have to wait. Two more will only see the increase in 2005, but the other three justices -- Rose, Nancy Becker and Myron Leavitt -- will be working for sub-par wages for four of their six-year terms.

That just isn't right, and it creates a real disincentive for qualified people to become and stay judges. Yet the Sun editorialized that Justice Rose was wrong for testifying that there should be parity in the pay scale for Supreme Court justices.

Equal pay for equal work. That's wrong?

Justice Rose shouldn't be criticized. He should be commended for speaking up. Correcting the inequity is simply the right thing to do. We have always looked to judges for fairness, yet the Sun says they, in return, do not deserve the fairness of equal compensation. Perhaps the Sun should rethink its editorial position.

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