Motivation and fair pay

A raise that’s hard to justify,” Opinion, Jan. 4

How can Scott Baker conclude that judges making far less than their private practice peers are nonetheless provably just as qualified? What evidence proves that lower-paid judges have the same legal quality as higher-paid judges? As judicial salaries fail to keep pace with private attorney salaries, there is an obvious financial motivation for more successful attorneys to avoid judicial service.

The baseball umpire analogy is unhelpful. Umpires don’t hit home runs, field balls or need the hand-eye coordination of great players to see whether a ball is foul or fair. Judges actually need great attorney skills to weigh evidence, read and understand statutes and cases and render sound legal decisions. Judges are rated as qualified based on the quality of their prior legal service.

Attorneys want judges with superior legal and analytical skills. If your personal liberty is ever at stake, I suspect you’ll hope the judge is the smartest, fairest, best-educated and most qualified “attorney” in the courtroom.

Jim Eischen

La Jolla

Re “Pay scales of justice,” editorial, Jan. 3

That The Times followed its strong opposition to a living wage by a strong support of judicial raises shows the disconnect in thinking about the motivation for the poor and the wealthy. The poor are told to let the market set the wages even if they’re set below the cost of living. The judges, we are told, couldn’t possibly work for less than extravagant wages. The current salaries for judges is enough to provide a comfortable living even in L.A. The market wages at the bottom of the income scale, however, are simply insufficient to support a stable family and represent one of the most inefficient and costly forms of subsidy for employers. We must abandon the weird notion that the wealthy can only be motivated by huge sums of money but workers’ behavior will not change if they are paid less than it costs to live.

Robert Lee Hotchkiss

San Diego