If Steven Calabresi gets his way, he just may undo more than 200 years of American judicial precedent.
The Northwestern professor of constitutional law has joined a pan-academic coalition of legal scholars who are seeking to impose 18-year term limits upon U.S. Supreme Court justices, thus ending the Constitution’s guarantee of life tenure on the high bench.
The academic push is led by Roger Cramton, emeritus professor of law at Cornell University, and Paul Carrington, a former dean of the Duke University School of Law.
According to Cramton, the bipartisan group has contacted members of the Senate Judiciary Committee with the intent of getting a Senate hearing on a statute — or possibly a Constitutional amendment — that would create term limits for members of the high court.
“Life tenure was fine in 1789,” Cramton said, “but now circumstances have changed and thoughtful people, like the founders, would not have included it if they had anticipated the increases in longevity, the enormous increases in their own power, the control over their own workload.
“(Rotating the justices) is essentially the only legitimate control of the Supreme Court of the United States,” he said.
Cramton said that he and Calabresi had developed similar ideas about the court independent of one another, and that Calabresi’s contributions to the movement had been “extremely valuable.”
Calabresi and fellow NU law professor James Lindgren currently are co-authoring an article arguing in favor of term limits.
“I think Supreme Court justices are incredibly powerful,” Calabresi said, “and just as we limit the president to eight years in office because that’s an incredibly powerful office, we need to put an outer limit on this office.
“I think having one person exercise that much power for 35 or 40 years is fundamentally wrong in a democracy,” he added.
For most of U.S. history, the average tenure of a Supreme Court justice has been 14 years, Calabresi said. In the last three decades, that average has jumped to 26 years.
If the term limits were passed, every two years the senior-most member of the court would retire to a federal circuit court, Calabresi said. He said he believes that having a frequent turnover in the Supreme Court might assuage the partisan conflict over judicial confirmations.
“If you look at the political elite in the Democratic party and the Republican party, they’re absolutely waging nuclear war over who gets to be a judge,” Calabresi said. By lowering the stakes of an individual appointment, term limits “might lower the temperature of the overall argument.”
Beyond Calabresi and Lindgren, the term limit movement seems to have at least some support within the NU School of Law. Three different professors said they were interested in — if not fully supportive of — Calabresi’s agenda.
“I can certainly understand the problem to which Prof. Calabresi is responding,” said Stephen B. Presser, NU professor of legal history. “(I) think we should be thinking about a number of different remedies for this problem, and Prof. Calabresi’s is certainly one worth considering.”
Reach Jordan Weissmann at [email protected].
