Senior Help

One might delicately refer to it as a senior issue. Since 2003, the number of senior federal judges, both appellate and district, has crept higher. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reports that, as of December 2007, there were 473 senior judges, with varying workloads, complementing the federal judiciary’s ranks of active judges.

It has never been suggested that these senior judges — who willingly lay aside retirement with full pay to keep working — financially burden the federal judiciary. But the phenomenon is raising eyebrows in Congress.

Yesterday, courts officials canvassed the Hill with the federal judiciary’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2009. Included in the $6.7 billion request was a line about “an anticipated increase in the number of on-board senior Article III judges.”

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services, broached the topic — delicately — during his round of questions for Judge Julia Gibbons of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, chairwoman of the Judicial Conference’s budget committee, and James Duff, director of the Administrative Office.

“It sounds like, in most instances, that senior judges may require additional resources,” Durbin said. (The budget proposal does not include a dollar amount, as it’s unclear how many eligible judges will delay retirement.)

Gibbons moved quickly to quash that line of thought. “That’s too simplistic,” she said, adding that senior judges provide more resources than they burn because many work nearly as much as their officially active peers.

Judges can retire or take senior status when their years on the bench and their age add up to 80 (it’s called the Rule of 80). Senior judges are required to work at least 25 percent as much as active judges, and according to the AO, they bear at least 18 percent of the workload in the courts of appeals and about 17 percent in the district courts.

Senior judges have full-time staff — at least one law clerk and an assistant, and often more depending on their workload — and they need space. But as Duff put it, the courts “could not function” without them. With that, Durbin moved on to the next question.

Comments

[dcuser]

The right to eventually take senior status functions, during the judge's active tenure, as an inducement to take and keep the job. Senior status functions essentially as an annuity, giving the judge a guaranteed income til death. (That's particularly so since, after a certain age or in cases of disability, the judge doesn't have to work at all.) The prospect of eventual senior status thus factors into active duty judges' retirement planning. If that were taken away without some sort of substitute (whether that was additional active-time compensation, or retirement plan contributions), then more judges would have to leave the bench in their 60s to cash out in the private sector for a few years.