A recent commentary in The New Yorker points out that among Rick Perry’s many far-flung, novel ideas about changing the Constitution, one in particular is worth revisiting: imposing term limits on all future appointees to the Supreme Court. The specifics of the proposal—18-year terms that are staggered every two years, giving every President the opportunity to appoint two Justices per term—are fairly simple. Moreover, this change would seemingly address some of the perceived problems with the Court’s current structure, which, in an increasingly politically divided country, encourages Justices to consider their tenure in the context of the current political climate, given that any nomination to the Court is now a political spectacle because of the impact that Justice may have in a literal lifetime on the bench.

The case for term limits is hardly a new one, as academics and journalists alike have played with the notion since at least 2002, when law professors (of significantly different political leanings) Akhil Reed Amar and Steven G. Calabresi wrote an editorial in the Washington Post, advocating term limits for Supreme Court Justices as a means of refocusing a judicial system whose independence and incentives had gone astray. Calabresi and his colleague, James Lindgren, explored the idea in much more detail in a 2006 paper published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, in which the professors examined, in depth, the historical trends of Justices’ tenures and the judicial implications, concluding that the current system, of life tenure, was deeply flawed.

Beyond the idea itself of term limits, the fundamental issue is, of course, how term limits, or something similar, could be implemented. As Amar and Calabresi note, the United States is the only major democracy in the world whose Constitutions endorses “unelected life tenure,” instead of, for instance, a fixed term or a mandatory retirement age. Calabresi and Lindgren found that the most efficient and effective way of enacting term limits would be through a Constitutional amendment that mandated the 18-year terms, yet allowed Justices to continue serving in lower federal courts after the end of their tenure. Other solutions, including statutes or collective agreement to retire at a certain age, are more problematic. However, all three solutions would be hampered by political division and posturing on both sides of the aisle—the very ills that proponents of Supreme Court term limits are looking to cure.