Last Friday, as the state and much of the East coast was preparing for Hurricane Irene, the 7 members of the judicial compensation commission met to vote on a proposed pay raise for New York’s judges.

After a few hours of occasionally heated debate, they voted 4 to 3 to approve a plan that will increase pay for state supreme court judges to $174 thousand dollars by 20-14 – a total increase of just over 27 percent.
The salary for all other judges will rise by the same percentage. Unless the legislature and the governor object, judges will receive their first pay bump next April after seeing their paychecks stagnate since January 1995. This is something my next guest has been fighting for since he became Chief Judge of New York State back in 2009.

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