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Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Supreme Youth
Since 1900, no Supreme Court justice (nor any nominee) has
been under the age of 40.
One reason may be politics. Supreme Court justices sit for
life, and a younger justice will likely serve a longer term. Political opponents of the nominating
president will be more hostile to a younger nominee. Alternatively, the president may be concerned
that a young justice might, over a long career, drift in an undesirable
political direction.
Of course, politics aren’t the whole story. There are two immediately obvious substantive reasons why we don’t see young nominees: inexperience and small sample size.
The inexperience concern is the worry that
young jurists lack sufficient life and/or judging experience to be effective
justices. The sample size concern is the
worry that however brilliant a young potential nominee may seem, his or her
track record is too short to be reliable evidence of the exceptional judicial
quality we expect of justices.
One (to me) entertaining way to assess the attractiveness of Supreme Youth is to ask: would the path of the law be better, worse, or the same if we had one or more justices in their thirties? Let’s isolate the youth issue by framing the question such that we’re talking about the path of the law in the period in which the Imaginary Young Justice is in his/her thirties and early forties -- in other words, is the IYJ good or bad for the path of the law in that period, compared to a grey-haired alternative?
Posted by Brendan Maher on September 8, 2010 at 12:48 AM | Permalink
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