« Courts - More on: Illinois Judge Refused Post-Wreck DUI Test While Another Judge Ditched Beer | Main | Ind. Courts - Chief Justice Randall T. Shepard has filed for re-appointment as Chief Justice of Indiana »

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Courts - "Where Have You Gone, Sherman Minton?"

A brief notice from How Appealing today:

Available online at SSRN: Justin Crowe and Christopher Karpowitz have a paper titled "Where Have You Gone, Sherman Minton? The Decline of the Short-Term Supreme Court Justice" (abstract with link for download).
The ILB took a look at the paper, given that Justice Minton was a Hoosier (New Albany) and a 7th Circuit judge from 1941-49 in addition to serving as a Supreme Court justice from 1949-56. Wikipedia bio is here.

From the 50-page paper:

What is distinctive about the modern Court is that it has lost its least visible members: the short-term justices. In other words, the modern Court is different not because the justices are setting new records in longevity, but because it does not include any short-termers like Benjamin Curtis or Sherman Minton, the kinds of justices whose relative brief service has long been a staple on the Court. Whether the disappearance of justices in this mold is a problem that needs to be solved remains an open question, but it raises quite different issues than those assumed by advocates of reform. [p. 5]

Even into the twentieth century, however, illness and untimely death continued to result in vacancies and more frequent than anticipated turnover. Sherman Minton, who came onto the Court in 1949, served barely more than seven years before the combination of a heart attack, pernicious anemia, and a crippling spinal ailment caused him to feel that he was “slipping fast.” Combined with his boredom on the Court and worries about mental inadequacy, these physical conditions led the staunch Democrat to step down at the moment he was eligible for full retirement benefits, despite the fact that it meant leaving a vacancy to be filled by Republican Dwight Eisenhower. [p. 15]

The paper includes at p. 49 a fascinating table, Table 1: Categories of Short-Term Justices, with 4 categories: Illness/Death; Dissatisfaction; Ambition; Scandal/Rejection.

More recent justices falling within the latter two categories are Arthur Goldberg (1962-1965) - Ambition; and Abe Fortas (1965-1969) - Scandal/Rejection.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on December 12, 2006 08:12 AM
Posted to Courts in general