Mandatory Retirement for Judges Improved Performance on U.S. State Supreme Courts

Elliott Ash and W. Bentley Macleod

No 28025, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: 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.

JEL-codes: D02 J26 J41 J44 K0 K4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-eff, nep-law and nep-lma
Note: AG LE LS
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Journal Article: Mandatory Retirement for Judges Improved the Performance of US State Supreme Courts (2024)
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