Mandatory Retirement for Judges Improved Performance on U.S. State Supreme Courts / Elliott Ash, W. Bentley MacLeod.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ash, Elliott.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

MacLeod, W. Bentley.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w28025.

NBER working paper series no. w28025

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.

Summary:

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.

Notes:

Print version record

October 2020.