BATON ROUGE — A state panel on Monday suggested that legislators give pay raises to judges after an economist said members of the judiciary have less purchasing power than they did as a group in 1983.

Loren Scott laid out four possible paths for members of the Louisiana Judicial Compensation Commission, who were tasked with looking into potential pay raises for state judges.

Scott said he preferred giving judges a major bump soon, and then grant future raises in line with the consumer price index.

“I would suggest that it be tied to CPI,” Scott said. “Judicial salaries should at least keep up with inflation. The problem isn’t what the salaries were in 1983.”

Tying wages to state or regional averages would still leave judges behind, Scott said, who also described how some other states,

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