When President Biden announced in April 2021 that he was forming the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, it was not clear what the commission could do as a practical matter. The primary complaints about the Court — the fraught confirmation process for justices, the lack of an ethics code with teeth, the extraordinary length of time in office that modern justices typically serve, and the Court’s seeming insulation from any effective form of check or balance — seemed beyond cure, at least without a constitutional amendment. And despite the distinction of the commission’s leadership and members, its December 2021 final report seemed to vindicate those concerns.
But that reaction may have been too quick. On the understanding that its job was not to provide concrete recommendations, the commission stressed that it was not urging any particular reform. Instead, it aimed only to give a full description of the history of Court reform efforts and the pros and cons of a number of suggestions that have been floated in recent years. The report succeeded admirably in that more modest goal.
The time has come, however, to take the debate one step further. Prominent among the reform possibilities that the commission considered was what it called “term limits,” although that moniker is misleading. More accurately, what the commission outlined — and what a working group of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (of which I was a member) further elaborated in a 2023 report titled The Case for Supreme Court Term Limits — is a proposal that hinges on case assignments.
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