Causes and Consequences of Judicial Selection and Turnover at the Supreme/High Court Level

It is well established that justices of a country’s highest court are powerful political elites. With a stroke of a pen, justices are able to declare laws unconstitutional, reverse or reinforce controversial policy in times of crisis and in some cases re-write laws by their own hand. Because of this power, there is a remarkable literature about the selection of justices. Interestingly, less attention is paid to judicial tenureship and resignation. A better understanding of the interplay between political and judicial elites in terms of policy decisions and dynamics of constitutional and judicial reform arguably requires a thorough inspection of how justices are selected. But it also needs studies on why some justices last until term while others choose to leave the bench (and under what circumstances this most often occurs) to highlight how these career aspects are inter-related and how they affect or are affected by these elites’ behaviour during their tenure. Indeed, the traditional principal-agent relationships which inform many discussions on elected political elites may not apply to unelected and irremovable judicial elites. This workshop sets out to explore this phenomenon by welcoming paper proposals for single case or comparative contributions which are methodologically diverse and theoretically informed. Proposals which relate judicial careers (recruitment, length of tenure and reasons for resignation) to complete (including post-judicial) career paths, judicial dissent, the preferences and/or ideologies of individual justices or courts and “governing from the bench”, as well as dynamics of constitutional and judicial reforms are especially welcome.