TOPLINE Supreme Court justices should face 18-year term limits, a bipartisan working group of legal experts proposed in a new report released Wednesday, arguing the 鈥渧ital鈥 reform would help depoliticize the court as public trust in the institution remains low.
KEY FACTS
- The report, published by a working group of scholars at the 亚色影库app that studied the Supreme Court, proposes Congress pass a statute that would establish 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices.
- The working group argues that doing so would preserve 鈥渏udicial independence鈥 while improving the court鈥檚 reputation and 鈥渞educing the incentives for strategic retirements and political campaign鈥搒tyle efforts focused on the nominations process.鈥
- Justices would take 鈥渟enior status鈥 once their term is up, which means they wouldn鈥檛 be part of the court鈥檚 key nine justices, but could still take actions like serving on lower circuit courts, handling administrative tasks or taking part in Supreme Court opinions if the court would otherwise lack a quorum.
- Setting an 18-year limit is in line with how long the average justice has historically served on the court, the report notes, and means presidents would be able to predictably appoint two justices per term, with no single president able to appoint a majority of justices on the court.
- Implementing the term limits would require the court to temporarily expand its number of justices, as new justices would be added every two years but no term limits would be imposed on the justices already on the court, with the group predicting it would take until 2047 for the process to complete and for there to permanently be nine justices on the court.
- The working group鈥檚 members include such experts as U.S. Circuit Judge Diane Wood, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, Harvard law professor Charles Fried, who served as U.S. solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan, and scholars from such institutions as Yale Law School, Georgetown Law School, Harvard Law School and University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.