by TChris

Should Supreme Court justices serve until they retire or die? The Framers thought so, but Linda Greenhouse reports on the academic argument for proposals that would limit a justice's tenure on the Court.

The academic critics see a variety of negative consequences from life tenure. One is that the scarcity and randomness of vacancies promise to turn each one into a galvanizing crisis. Other drawbacks include the temptation for justices to time their retirements for political advantage; an overemphasis on youth and staying power as a qualification for nominees; the likelihood that even those justices who escape the infirmities of old age - and, predictably, not all will escape - will tend after many decades to lose touch with the surrounding culture; and the fear that if the court is seen as out of touch and unaccountable to a democratic society, its legitimacy will erode.

One proposal would allow the president to appoint a new justice every two years. Each new justice would bump the most senior sitting justice into "senior status." Senior status justices would occasionally emerge from semi-retirement to perform temporary judicial assignments.

Critics worry that the plan would produce a Court that will follow the moment's prevailing political winds rather than precedent. Professor Ward Farnsworth wonders whether we can envision the problems that such a radical change would create:

"Life tenure has costs that we have learned to live with, and we ought to hesitate long before switching."