Working Paper: NBER ID: w28025
Authors: Elliott Ash; W. Bentley MacLeod
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.
Keywords: Mandatory Retirement; Judicial Performance; Aging Judges; State Supreme Courts
JEL Codes: D02; J26; J41; J44; K0
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Mandatory retirement (J26) | court performance (K40) |
| Mandatory retirement (J26) | decrease in age of working judges (J26) |
| decrease in age of working judges (J26) | court performance (K40) |
| selective attrition (C24) | court performance (K40) |
| younger judges increase output (K41) | court performance (K40) |