Another Supreme Court Reform Proposal

I remain convinced we need to limit the terms of all federal judges. Let no person serve more than a total 25 years in the federal judiciary. As a former lawyer, I think the federals judiciary has become a closed loop of people with no experience other than as a federal judge. It seems a little incestuous from here. That is why I think any term limitation must be aggregate time spent in the federal judiciary. The time period is negotiable.

I would also limit the Supreme Court's size to the number of federal circuits.

However, trying to be fair, and thinking someone might just want to read about this subject, I suggest reading How to Balance the Supreme Court, of which the following is an excerpt:

Dan Epps: Yeah. And so, uh, the way you summarized it, I think is, uh, exactly right. So I think, um, –in terms of the motivation, um, and then I’ll get into the details– we were sort of thinking, look, how can we construct a system that, uh, structurally kind of produces justices who are not just pure partisans?

[00:04:27] Because once you have the pure partisanship, I, I really believe the whole thing starts to break down. And, you know, uh, And you could be fine with that. Um, our argument was like, you know, we, it does, it’s important to have a court. People have legitimacy, uh, faith in the law in some broader sense, but you can’t just have it be partisan.

[00:04:47] So we sort of said like, what would that look like? How would you change the system to, um, to to, to not make sure it’s all partisans. And we do it in kind of a, our proposal does it in kind of a wacky way. Um, and uh, the idea actually comes from an analog to, um, like civil arbitration, like between like, uh, investors and, you know, states and, you know, like two companies where, um, basically each side, um, gets to appoint like one arbitrator.

[00:05:19] So there’s two, one appointed by each side. Then they’re each one, we know exactly how they’re gonna vote, but then those two have to agree on somebody else. Right. And that person is actually the decider. Um, and I sort of said, you know, we sort of said like, what if, how would you, like, that’s kind of not a crazy system where you ensure that like the person who’s actually making the decision is kind of fair and everybody thinks they’re reasonable, uh, and so forth.

[00:05:42] And so we sort of said maybe we could harness, uh, partisan politics in a way to actually make the court less partisan. So you’d actually, um, we’d start with kind of, you know, five slots that are kind of allocated to, uh, Democrats in some way. You know, we don’t need to get into the weeds about how exactly to do that and five slots that are kind of allocated to Republicans in some way.

I think it very optimistic as a cure for what ails us.

sch 8/10 

[00:06:06] Um, but then the justices. Those justices would have to kind of agree on who to kind of call up from the lower courts to kind of sit on the court with them. And those justices would kind of be the deciders in a lot of cases. And I think, you know, you can, you know, get into a lot of, you know, try to game it out.