I disagree somewhat that judges face near-zero discipline for incompetence. Except for judges on the highest court in a jurisdiction, most judges frequently face the prospect that the opinions they author may be reversed. It is true that frequent reversals will almost never lead to the sanction of the judge losing his or her job (due to lifetime appointments or ineffectiveness of elections at removing incumbent judges except for the most serious and publicized faults). But the resulting hit to status for frequent reversals can be quite serious; and because judges are so high status, as you note, they tend to be very concerned with maintaining that status. The handful of judges I’ve known personally have been quite concerned with their reversal rate and they particularly don’t want to be reversed in a way that is embarrassing to them because it suggests laziness, incompetence, poor reasoning, cutting corners, or the like. (On the other hand, reversal for disagreements that can be characterized as “political” is probably not seen as quite so status-lowering.) At any rate, the law does provide checklist-like procedures or guidelines in many instances, and most judges do follow them, at least in part because failure to do so could lead to reversal.
I disagree somewhat that judges face near-zero discipline for incompetence. Except for judges on the highest court in a jurisdiction, most judges frequently face the prospect that the opinions they author may be reversed. It is true that frequent reversals will almost never lead to the sanction of the judge losing his or her job (due to lifetime appointments or ineffectiveness of elections at removing incumbent judges except for the most serious and publicized faults). But the resulting hit to status for frequent reversals can be quite serious; and because judges are so high status, as you note, they tend to be very concerned with maintaining that status. The handful of judges I’ve known personally have been quite concerned with their reversal rate and they particularly don’t want to be reversed in a way that is embarrassing to them because it suggests laziness, incompetence, poor reasoning, cutting corners, or the like. (On the other hand, reversal for disagreements that can be characterized as “political” is probably not seen as quite so status-lowering.) At any rate, the law does provide checklist-like procedures or guidelines in many instances, and most judges do follow them, at least in part because failure to do so could lead to reversal.