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An Empirical Analysis Of Life Tenure: A Response To Professors Calabresi And Lindgren, Ryan W. Scott, David R. Stras

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Opposition to life tenure has been steadily mounting in the legal academy and Professors Steve Calabresi and Jim Lindgren are among those leading the charge. Crucial to their argument that life tenure is fundamentally flawed is an empirical claim that the increases in average tenure among Supreme Court Justices are both dramatic and unprecedented.

In this article, the authors respond to Calabresi and Lindgren by showing that their hypothesis of dramatic and unprecedented growth in average tenure has two fundamental flaws. First, it suffers from a period-selection problem. Rendering the data using longer or shorter periods blunts or eliminates the …