Judicial pay raise!

The Metnews reports State Judges to Receive Automatic Pay Boosts, explaining that "California judges are receiving a 4.3 percent pay raise, retroactively to July 1 ...." The article also contains a chart of judicial salaries, noting the new annual salaries: Chief Justice = $286.507; Associate Justice = $273,213; Court of Appeal Justice = $256,138; Superior Court judge = $223,829. For comparison purposes, the article has a federal chart: Chief Justice = $280,500; Associate Justice = $268,300; Court of Appeals judge = $231,800; district court judge = $218,600.

In today's DJ's Moskovitz on Appeal, What do you think?, Myron points out that a lawyer's job is to "think about how other people think," and in particular (for appellate lawyers especially) to try to figure out how judges will think. He points out that there are few books "written by appellate judges about what motivates their decisions" (citing to Posner's "Reflections on Judging" and "How Judges Think" as exceptions). So he wishes that "some appellate judge would write something like that about his or her own thought processes when deciding a single case."