From the NYT:
In 2009 a politically diverse group of law professors, including me, proposed a system that would work around the need to amend the Constitution — an extremely unlikely possibility — yet still capture the benefits of term limits.
Here’s how our plan would work. Every two years the president would appoint a new justice to the court, but only the nine most junior justices, by years of service, would sit and decide every case.
The rest would then act as a sort of “bench” team, sitting on cases as needed because of the disability or disqualification of one of the junior justices. These senior justices might also help decide which of the thousands of petitions the court receives each year should be fully considered, vote on procedural rulemaking, and perhaps sit on occasional cases presented to lower circuit courts.
In short, our proposal would revise the job of a justice to a more human scale and perhaps make the court less likely to impose erratic political preferences on the citizens it governs. Because it would assure regular turnover, the court would experience fewer long-term ideological swings, enabling it to better do its original job of anchoring the legislative process to the Constitution.
This fits with our recent dicsussions in 2302, but 2301s - since we just discussed elections - should consider how this proposal might moderate the impact that the general population has on the Supreme Court.
