By the Numbers

How Would Supreme Court Term Limits Work?

Term limits would keep an unseemly amount of power out of the hands of just a few individuals. It’s a popular reform – even more so than court-packing. And it’s a policy that every other court of last of resort the world over has implemented – that or a mandatory retirement age.

So Let’s Crunch the Numbers.

First, let’s give future justices tenures of 18 years apiece, which is what leading scholars and Fix the Court advocate for. Let’s assume the current justices are grandfathered out of any new term limits law and that they’ll serve on average for 27 years, the mean tenure length for the last few decades. Let’s also assume there are no retirements in presidential election years, and let’s begin the calculations this year: