Paul Carrington writes up the only thing older than the justices on the Supreme Court: The argument that justices on the Supreme Court should retire earlier. And he's right! But he doesn't mention one of the main reasons justices retire: Uncertainty about their replacements. Thurgood Marshall, for instance, is the archetypal example of a justice who refused to vacate the premises long after his energy and mental acuity had flagged. He left the Court in July of 1991, at age 83, due to poor health. The surprise, though, is not how long he stayed, but the very fact that he left. Retirement at any time between 1980 and 1992 would mean replacement by a Republican. If you think of judges as spending their lives advocating a particular vision of jurisprudence, it stands to reason that they'd be similarly strategic in retirement and seek to leave the Court when they had some certainty as to their successor's basic intellectual sympathies. The question, then, is why we give them the option to wait out administrations. The problem with Supreme Court terms isn't that they're long so much as that they're indeterminate. Supreme Court terms should be a fixed 12 years. No more uncertainty. No more searching for smart 40-year-olds who can shape the court for half a century and dismissing 60-somethings because they're not likely to still be serving when our grandchildrens' holograms are twitterversing each other. No more letting judges assess the optimal moment for retirement. No more tossing Supreme Court retirements into an unsuspecting and overloaded political system. Put it on a schedule, make it predictable. THE 12 YEAR FIX.
Paul Carrington writes up the only thing older than the justices on the Supreme Court: The argument that justices on the Supreme Court should retire earlier. And he's right! But he doesn't mention one of the main reasons justices retire: Uncertainty about their replacements. Thurgood Marshall, for instance, is the archetypal example of a justice who refused to vacate the premises long after his energy and mental acuity had flagged. He left the Court in July of 1991, at age 83, due to poor health. The surprise, though, is not how long he stayed, but the very fact that he left. Retirement at any time between 1980 and 1992 would mean replacement by a Republican. If you think of judges as spending their lives advocating a particular vision of jurisprudence, it stands to reason that they'd be similarly strategic in retirement and seek to leave the Court when they had some certainty as to their successor's basic intellectual sympathies. The question, then, is why we give them the option to wait out administrations. The problem with Supreme Court terms isn't that they're long so much as that they're indeterminate. Supreme Court terms should be a fixed 12 years. No more uncertainty. No more searching for smart 40-year-olds who can shape the court for half a century and dismissing 60-somethings because they're not likely to still be serving when our grandchildrens' holograms are twitterversing each other. No more letting judges assess the optimal moment for retirement. No more tossing Supreme Court retirements into an unsuspecting and overloaded political system. Put it on a schedule, make it predictable. 
