Mandatory Retirement for Judges Improved Performance on U.S. State Supreme Courts
Mandatory retirement for judges has often been considered as a policy response to an aging judicial workforce. This paper provides empirical evidence on how mandatory retirement influences judge performance using a wave of such reforms in U.S. state supreme courts as a natural experiment. We find that introducing mandatory retirement improves court performance as measured by output (number of published opinions) and legal influence (number of forward citations to those opinions). While older judges are cited less often than younger judges, the effect of mandatory retirement on performance is much larger than what would be expected from a change in the age distribution. We find some evidence that the additional effect is due to selective attrition and that the presence of older judges reduces the performance of younger judges.
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Copy CitationElliott Ash and W. Bentley MacLeod, "Mandatory Retirement for Judges Improved Performance on U.S. State Supreme Courts," NBER Working Paper 28025 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3386/w28025.Download Citation
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