Federal judge joins bipartisan group of legal scholars to end Supreme Court 'arms race' with term limits

A group of leading US legal minds on both sides of the aisle are now calling on Congress to pass a law to implement term limits on US Supreme Court justices.

Reuters reported that the group specifically wants to end life terms for members of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) and replace them with 18-year terms. Under the group's proposal, these terms would be staggered so a US president would appoint a new justice every two years. Following their 18-year term, justices would be forced into a form of semi-retirement dubbed "senior status," but would still be able to hear appeals in lower courts and temporarily serve in another justice's stead if they were unavailable.

The 11-member group assembled by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based American Academy of Arts & Sciences includes US Circuit Judge Diane Wood — who was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1995 — as well as former President Ronald Reagan's solicitor general, Charles Fried.

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Yale constitutional law professor Akhil Reed Omar, another member of the group, told Reuters that term limits were necessary in order to improve the Court's perception among the public. He called the trend of appointing increasingly younger justices to SCOTUS and justices timing their retirements to coincide with the administration of a president in their chosen party "an arms race for people to maximize the number of years of their influence."

Judge Wood said that not only were term limits necessary for SCOTUS' reputation, but that imposing 18-year term limits was well within the bounds of the Constitution.

"I also believe that the proposal would have a healthy effect in the direction of reassuring people that the Supreme Court is a Court, not just one more political institution," Wood said.

The Court's reputation has been colored by increasingly partisan decisions, like the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that overturned 49 years of Constitutionally protected abortion rights. Allegations of corruption lodged against multiple justices, including Associate Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas, have fueled arguments calling for further regulations on the nation's highest judicial body.

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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) has already proposed legislation implementing 18-year term limits for members of SCOTUS. However, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives is unlikely to take up the bill, as term limits would be politically disadvantageous given that six of the Court's nine members were appointed by Republican presidents.