President Joe Biden has announced its intention to run term limits for supreme court judges, a reform with broad public support across the entire political spectrum. As the public increasingly losing confidence in the Court as an apolitical institution, it is both timely and wise for Biden to consider this path.

We have studied the potential impact of establishing Supreme Court term limits, and the results are convincing. Time limits could solve some of the problems plaguing the court.

Supreme Court nominations have become intensely politicized, in part because of their improprieties. Biden appointed only one justice in his one term, Ketanji Brown Jackson, while Donald Trump appointed three in his one term: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. (One-term Jimmy Carter appointed none.) Why would a president be able to appoint three times as many justices as his successor?

Term limits solve this problem. By limiting judges to staggered 18-year terms (as many court reform proposals do), appointments are regulated. This approach could significantly reduce partisan conflicts over nominations; if each president knows he or she will appoint two justices and the Senate knows the next vacancy is always just around the corner, the process is likely to be less contentious and overwrought. The stakes associated with a single encounter will be reduced. It’s not a panacea in a polarized era, but it can help. In addition, it reduces the role of mortality and retirements, which is an unpredictable way to run a branch of government.

Term limits also limit how long a jurist can exercise great power. Clarence Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1991. Although the President who named him, George HW Bush, left office in 1993, Thomas has served on the Court for over three decades and through seven presidential elections. This is not about ideology. New Deal official William O. Douglas was appointed to the court under Franklin Roosevelt and served 36 years until Gerald Ford’s presidency, the longest of any justice.

In addition, the time limits reduce the incentives for the judiciary to time their pensions strategically. Ruth Bader Ginsburg clung to her seat hoping Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election, but her gamble didn’t pay off. When she died just weeks before the 2020 election, Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to fill her place. But other judges’ retirement decisions have kept their seats under the control of the same party. For example, Reagan’s last nominee to the court, Anthony Kennedy, retired during the Trump administration, allowing Republicans to confirm a like-minded successor, his former lawyer Brett Kavanaugh. Likewise, Stephen Breyer, likely chastised by the Ginsburg example, retired during the Biden presidency.

Such “strategic retirements” empower the justices to try to choose their successors, undermining the founders’ vision of a judiciary shaped by the president and the Senate — by electoral forces — and not by justices consulting actuarial tables. Imposing term limits would eliminate this incentive for judges to have an outsized role in selecting their successor.

These are theoretical and empirical arguments anchored in data-driven simulations of our latest research. Our research shows the potential for term limits to foster a healthier relationship between the Court and the American electorate. For example, historically, roughly 60 percent of the years between 1937 and 2020 saw an ideologically “imbalanced” court — where one party’s appointments controlled seven or more seats.

But time limits change this completely. When we simulated what the Court would have looked like with terms, the median number of years in which one party’s appointees controlled seven or more seats would have dropped by as much as half. Why? During terms, presidents of both parties get an even chance to make appointments, and without incentives to retire strategically, justices would have to retire under opposing party presidents, so the percentage of seats “locked” by either party would go down.

It will not be easy to implement time limits. In addition to the political obstacles to enacting them, questions have also been raised about whether imposing Supreme Court term limits through an ordinary statute would be constitutional. The primary one is that the constitution stipulates that the judges of the Supreme Court “shall hold their offices in good conduct”, which is often interpreted to mean that they must be for life. There is, however strong academic support for the idea that term limits could be constitutional as long as the judges would continue to have the opportunity to have a meaningful judicial role after their 18-year terms expire. For example, the judges could replace other judges who resign. In addition, they could try cases at lower court levels, which was common in the 18^Th and 19^Th centuries and as some retired judges have done in recent years

We leave it to others to fully debate the constitutionality of various proposals for term limits, including the one ultimately favored by President Biden. If implemented, term limits could restore balance and integrity to an institution that has lost public trust as it plays an ever-increasing role in American life.

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