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 controversal 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. Given the prestige and job security attached to the position of supreme or high court justices, it is puzzling that these elites choose to vacate their seats on a voluntary basis at all. If the one side of the debate suggests we should have a better understanding of how justices are selected, one reasonably assumes that we should know why justices choose to leave the bench, and under what circumstances this most often occurs. Yet, the traditional principal-agent relationships which inform most discussions on elected political elites may not apply to unelected and unremovable judicial elites.
This paper explores the phenomena of both judicial appointment and turnover through the use of sequence analysis which will examine how the order and duration of pre-supreme court careers (e.g. private practice solicitor/barrister, government lawyer, non-legal job, lower-level court judge) are related to different kinds of career terminations, whether they take the form of voluntary and premature exits to pursue alternative opportunities or simply retirements from public life.
Supreme court judges are ideal candidates to subject to sequence analysis, in part because their numbers are not so large as to hinder the heavy computational demands required to conduct sequence analysis. But also because they are highly visible public figures whose pre-supreme court careers are heavily scrutinized, publicized and recorded as part of their appointment process.
