Bernard Nussbaum, in his latest letter to the Sun, which was carried in the adjacent columns yesterday, gets to what is emerging as the pith of Chief Judge Kaye’s lawsuit against the governor and the legislative leaders seeking a pay raise for herself and New York’s other judges. He says he isn’t arguing that the Constitution requires what the Framers rejected, which was the indexing of judicial salaries to “wheat or some other thing of permanent value.” Quoth Mr. Nussbaum: “That wouldn’t have worked for the reason that Gouverneur Morris and others said it wouldn’t work: There is no commodity that has a permanent, fixed value.”

To which we are inclined to say, Hmmmmmm. There’s no denying that the value of New York judges’ salaries has declined considerably over the past 10 years. It’s simply a fact that $136,700 doesn’t buy what it did when the judges first received that salary. In 1999, that salary had a value of about 500 ounces of gold. Today, the dollars a judge is paid a year have a value of only about 150 ounces of gold. A savvy judge could have hedged against that collapse in his or her pay. Their desire to be compensated now for their failure to have hedged will, whatever else comes out of this case, be a sentiment widely shared by the rest of us who failed to hedge. Win or lose, it might be wise to pay judges in the future not in scrip but in the barbarous relic.