Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Stras, David R
• Scott, Ryan W

Titel

An empirical analysis of life tenure: a response to professors Calabresi Lindgren

Ist Teil von

• Harvard journal of law and public policy, 2007-07, Vol.30 (3), p.791

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge: Harvard Society for Law and Public Policy, Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2007

Quelle

PAIS Index

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• [...] it produces infrequent vacancies, life tenure affords the President and Senate too few opportunities to act as a democratic check on the Court through the appointment of new members.6 Second, again because of infrequent vacancies, life tenure raises the stakes of each appointment to undesirable levels, thereby exacerbating the politicization of the appointment process.7 Third, life tenure allows Justices to serve well into old age, increasing the risk of "mental decrepitude" on the Court.8 Crucial to these policy criticisms is an underlying empirical claim that "the real-world, practical meaning of life tenure" has changed dramatically since 1970.9 Calabresi and Lindgren point to several trends as evidence of this transformation. In the winter of 2005, we published an article taking a contrary view, defending life tenure as an institution worth preserving but proposing a package of retirement incentives-a golden parachute for Supreme Court Justices-to encourage mentally infirm Justices to retire in a timely manner.11 We agreed with Calabresi and Lindgren on a number of issues, echoing their concerns about mental and physical infirmity on the Supreme Court,12 and agreeing that statutory efforts to abolish life tenure are unconstitutional.13 But we also dedicated less than two pages of our seventy-page article to a rebuttal of one aspect of Calabresi and Lindgren's empirical claim, arguing that the astonishing increase in average tenure depends more on the chosen period lengths than a bona fide trend.