Should The Supreme Court Have Term Limits?
It's a story that reads like the start of a joke about lawyers. "What do you get when you have 33 legal academics and jurists with nothing better to do...?"
Not content with writing boring law review articles, or fighting among themselves about whose navel is best contemplated, a group of leading lights in legal scholarship have gathered together to try to argue in the court of public opinion that the Supreme Court needs a structural overhaul.
Not surprisingly, since all these people are lawyers remember, there is no agreement even within the group about whether and how that can happen.
Here's how the Washington Post's Robert Barnes puts it: "For starters, the group proposes a form of term limits, moving justices to senior status after 18 years on the court. The proposal says that justices now linger so long that it diminishes the likelihood that the court's decisions 'will reflect the moral and political values of the contemporary citizens they govern.'
"To get around the Constitution's prescription that justices serve for life, the group would let justices stay on the court in a senior role -- filling in on a case, perhaps, or dispatched to lower courts -- or lure them into retirement with promises of hefty bonuses. It would set up a regular rotation on the court by providing for the nomination of a new justice by the president with each new two-year term of Congress. If that results in more than the current nine justices, only the nine most junior would hear cases."
Ain't gonna happen. But that doesn't mean it's altogether bad to talk about it. The Surpeme Court's docket has fallen significantly during the Rehnquist Era (and now with the Roberts Court) and there are legitimate questions now about the way in which law clerks help select the cases that are heard each term. It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for the Justices to feel a little indirect pressure from the people most closely associated with their work.
There is one part of the letter from the scholars that I would have liked to have seen omitted. I don't think that elderly judges, including Supreme Court Justices, lose their ability to "reflect the moral and political values of the contemporary citizens they govern" and who says they ought to, anyway?
I am perfectly comfortable, in other words, with the notion that at least one branch of the government is run by adults.
