A Modest Proposal

I was in Tulsa yesterday for a wonderful conference at the University of Tulsa Law School honoring the work and career of Laurence Tribe. It is the kind of event that makes one aware of the almost incredible breadth of Tribe's career as a constitutional theorist, litigator, designer, and commentator, not to mention the teacher and mentor of many people who have gone on to extraordinary careers themselves. I was proud to join in the celebration of a remarkable career.

But it was reading the program, and not simply thinking about the scholarship of Larry Tribe, that generates this particular missive. I was suddenly struck by the fact that many of us in the academy are now of an age that we have suitably impressive titles in front of our names. Tribe, of course, is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard. I am the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood Jr. Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School. Jack Balkin is the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale. David Luban is the Frederick Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy at Georgetown University's Law Center and Department of Philosophy. Or, to move to another realm, consider the fact that Glenn Dicterow, the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, holds the Charles E. Culpupper Chair. And football fans have presumably adjusted to watching the "Allstate Sugar Bowl" or the "AT&T Cotton Bowl." I could obviously go on and on, limited only by my imagination at Googling. (I haven't even mentioned the names of buildings, libraries, rooms, and even alcoves.)

So here comes the "modest proposal": As is well known, John Roberts has been complaining that we face a "constitutional crisis" because of the meager salaries received by federal judges. For a variety of reasons, it appears highly unlikely that members of Congress are going to vote to pay federal judges considerably higher salaries than the legislators receive. So the solution seems obvious. The judiciary should take a lesson from leading academic institutions as well as contemporary athletics and orchestras. Why shouldn't John Roberts become, say, the Cravath, Swaine, and Moore Chief Justice, with his taxpayer-provided salary supplemented by whatever CS&M thought suitable? And, of course, each of the Associates could fill a seat named after the donor, with the attendant salary supplement. (If the name and supplement are linked with the seat, then assignments would change as membership on the Court changed. The former junior Justice, Stephen Breyer, would have served his eleven years as the West Publishing Co. Junior Justice, a "chair" taken over now by Samuel Alito, and now might be the Exxon-Mobil or Walt Disney Associate Justice.)

Questions might be raised, of course, about the willingness of judges to remain sturdily independent when hearing a case involving "their" donor, but if the gift is irrevocable, we should certainly have at least as much faith in their capacity to be independent as when, say, they are hearing cases brought by the Administration that appointed them with certain hopes in mind.

So isn't this the perfect way to solve the problem? The judges would make more (perhaps much more) money, without its costing the taxpayers a dollar. I look forward to hearing Antonin Scalia introduced as, say, the "Trial Lawyers of America Associate Justice" or, for that matter, Anthony Kennedy as the "David Geffen Justice." Isn't that the American way?

Once this idea takes off, we can move on to discuss "naming rights" for a particular presidential term!