You can see that there are five justice who can expect to be there for decades, if all goes well. The others -- how long are they likely to be good for?
We can inform that question by looking at the recent departures from the Court:
So the median age of death or retirement is 80. Most observers expect Ginsberg to go maybe next year, but who knows. The only way Scalia will ever leave is feet-first, I predict. Kennedy -- who knows? but it is entirely possible that if Ginsberg leaves as expected, that Obama's second term could have no appointments and it would not be surprising if Palin's first term would have no appointments either. A decade of this Roberts court with little to no change is entirely possible.
That strikes me as a scary thing. I don't like this court. I don't like being Anthony Kennedy's whim away from an incredibly activist conservative court (as opposed to the remarkably active conservative court it currently is). One selling point for Kagan on the left is that she is considered highly persuasive especially to her ideological opponents, and she is being "marketed" as a dealmaker who can keep Kennedy on the sane side of the line.
As Yogi Berra once said, it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future. I hope that I'm wrong and that Scalia and Thomas both discover a deep desire for spending their days on a Miami beach next year. That seems unlikely. Which also brings me to another remarkable thing about the SCOTUS. They are a long-lived bunch who tend to work very hard on hard things into their very advanced years. And how many people even want to keep working into their '80s, let alone are capable of it? It's amazing that we don't see more tragic deaths at young ages -- heart attacks and the like. I've never heard of a justice suffering from dementia, which is otherwise the scourge of the elderly. It's very true that these are not exactly a random assortment of septuagenarians but even so, cancer and dementia don't seem to discriminate much. Still, it's a remarkable thing, and with an n of 18 it's not like we can draw a lot of conclusions, but it hardly seems like it can be luck alone, does it?
1 comment:
cancer and dementia don't seem to discriminate much.
I think the best evidence does support the idea that using one's brain on hard problems holds off dementia... so at least on that score we might think we see a cause and effect.
But on the other diseases it seems difficult to understand. Their stress level may be, as a group, quite low. They don't have bosses, they aren't under a great deal of scrutiny, relatively speaking. They probably get a *lot* of attention from their doctors (who wants to be the guy who didn't order a test for a justice who drops dead the next day?). They seem to be a group that establishes and sticks to a routine, which seems to me, in my amateurish way, to be a hallmark of a long life. But cause and effect may be reversed for that characteristic.
Hard to say if there is a why.
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