Do Federal Appeals Court Judges really deserve their $184,500 annual salaries? Of course not!

• Ninth Circuit judges generally have four (4) law clerks, and the circuit shares seventy (70) staff attorneys, who process roughly 40 percent of the cases in which we issue a merits ruling
• When I say process, I mean that they [law clerks] read the briefs, review the record, research the law, and prepare a proposed disposition, which they then present to a panel of three judges during a practice we call “oral screening” [should be oral screwing for affected litigants]
• It’s called oral because the judges don’t see the briefs in advance, and because they generally rely on the staff attorney’s oral description of the case in deciding whether to sign on to the proposed disposition.
• Writing opinions is a difficult, time-consuming, exacting task. It is a reality of current judicial life that few judges draft their own opinions from scratch
• Generally, judges will give instructions about how a case is to be decided and what points the opinion should make, but the initial drafting is almost always left to a law clerk.
• If a judge chooses to fiddle a bit with an opinion drafted by his/her clerk, nobody outside chambers will know.
• We do occasionally get opinions circulated that read like they were written by someone a year out of law school with no supervision.