Mental Decrepitude on the U.S. Supreme Court: The Historical Case for a 28th Amendment

Mental decrepitude and incapacity have troubled the United States Supreme Court from the 1990s to the 1990s. The history of the Court is replete with repeated instances of justices casting decisive votes of otherwise participating actively in the Court's work when their colleagues and/or families had serious doubts about their mental capacities. Contrary to conventional wisdom among legal scholars and historians, a through survey of Supreme Court historiography reveals that mental decrepitude has been an even more frequent problem on the twentieth-century Court than it was during the nineteenth. The historical evidence convincingly demonstrates that mental decrepitude among aging justices is a persistently recurring problem that merits serious attention.