This pushback can and should include the possibility of reforming the way the court does business: Term limits and supermajority requirements, for instance, are both plausible responses to the weirdness of having our great controversies settled by the timing of an aging justice's final illness, or the idiosyncracies of Anthony Kennedy.
They recalled an earlier era when aging Justice Thurgood Marshall, a hero of the civil rights movement, hung on into his early 80s, but was forced to retire because of his health.
A retirement decision rests with an individual justice, but history is rife with tensions between aging justices and anxious presidents.
Roosevelt feared that the mostly aged justices would go on to destroy the rest of his legislative achievements before he would have a chance to make any new appointments.
"There are so many rules correlated with age," Justice Breyer said.
"The great generalities of the Constitution have a content and significance that vary from age to age," Justice Benjamin Cardozo said in 1921.
The list included several state government departments as recipients of the federal funds, including various departments of education, as well as health and ageing, justice and attorney general, and sport and recreation.
In the late Middle Ages, justice in Scotland was a mixture of the royal and local, which was often unsystematic with overlapping jurisdictions, undertaken by clerical lawyers, laymen, amateurs and local leaders.
Paul D. Carrington's article questioning the "wisdom and virtue of people in their 70s," referring to the increasing loss of judgment of aging Supreme Court justices, made sense several decades ago, but the world and its people are no longer quite so fragile.
Robert Faber Ann Arbor, Mich., April 13 , 2009 To the Editor: Paul D. Carrington, a Duke University Law School professor, suggests censure and possible impeachment proceedings to remove aging Supreme Court justices who are deemed by Congress or a Congressionally appointed committee to be incapable of performing their jobs.
Equally important, in the pre-monastic age, justices often took on politically charged government responsibilities when the world needed them.
