Saving This Honorable Court: A Proposal to Replace Life Tenure on the Supreme Court with Staggered, Nonrenewable Eighteen-Year Terms

The increased involvement of the Supreme Court in a broad array of political issues has created three primary problems. The first is strategic retirements. As justices have become more personally invested in their decisions, they have become more and more loathe to allow a president with opposing viewpoints to name their successors. The results has been strategic retirements, carefully timed departures, that allow presidents to fill vacancies with a similarly like-minded judge. Second, the present system gives an improper incentive to a president to nominate a young candidate for the Court because a younger nominee generally ensures the perpetuation of the president's particular sociopolitical vision over a longer tenure. Finally, an additional problem with the current system is the randomness of the distribution of those Supreme Court appointments among presidents. The best way to address these three problems without sacrificing judicial independence is to replace life tenure on the Supreme Court with a system of staggered, nonrenewable eighteen-year terms.