Federal Judicial Balance and Accountability Act¶
Evaluation Against the Chilton et al. Design Framework¶
Published February 2026¶
Based on Rev 2.2 of the Federal Judicial Balance and Accountability Act
Introduction¶
In 2021, Adam Chilton, Daniel Epps, Kyle Rozema, and Maya Sen published "Designing Supreme Court Term Limits" in the Southern California Law Review, providing the most rigorous empirical framework to date for evaluating proposals to regularize Supreme Court appointments. Their article identifies nine key design decisions that any complete term-limits proposal must address, develops a simulation methodology to assess how proposals would have shaped the Court over the last eighty years, and isolates the design features that produce significantly different outcomes across proposals.
This document evaluates the Federal Judicial Balance and Accountability Act (FJBAA), hereafter "the Act," against the Chilton et al. framework. The evaluation proceeds in three parts. Part I assesses the Act's response to each of the nine design decisions Chilton et al. identify. Part II evaluates the Act against the empirical findings and comparative insights their simulations produce. Part III identifies features of the Act that fall outside the Chilton framework but serve the same structural goals -- features that represent an expansion of the design space Chilton et al. map, rather than merely a response to it.
The evaluation is candid about the Act's strengths and limitations. Where the Act advances beyond existing proposals, this document explains why. Where it introduces tradeoffs that the Chilton framework would flag, those tradeoffs are acknowledged.
Part I: Response to the Nine Design Decisions¶
Chilton et al. identify nine design decisions that define and distinguish term-limits proposals. The Act addresses all nine, though several of its answers depart from the assumptions embedded in the framework.
1. Term Length¶
The Chilton framework notes that most commentators have converged on eighteen-year terms, though the case has been made for various durations. Shorter terms increase turnover and democratic responsiveness; longer terms promote doctrinal consistency and reduce final-period incentive concerns.
The Act uses a twelve-year active service period. This departs from the eighteen-year consensus, and the departure merits direct engagement rather than apologetic framing.
The eighteen-year consensus is underexamined. The convergence on eighteen years originates primarily from Calabresi and Lindgren's observation that eighteen-year terms produce two appointments per presidential term on a nine-seat Court with biennial scheduling. This is a mathematical convenience for a specific Court size, not a principled derivation. The Chilton paper itself treats term length as the least analytically interesting of the nine design decisions -- the authors note the tradeoffs and move on, essentially accepting the consensus without stress-testing it. No proposal in the literature argues for eighteen years with the rigor that the Act argues for twelve. Eighteen years functions as a negotiated midpoint between "life tenure is fine" and "the Court needs democratic accountability" -- a compromise, not a conclusion. Compromises are sometimes necessary, but they require justification at least as strong as the alternatives they displace.
Comparative institutional evidence supports twelve years. Germany's Federal Constitutional Court uses twelve-year non-renewable terms, a system widely regarded as producing both judicial independence and institutional renewal. The United Kingdom's twelve-year limit for its Supreme Court has functioned effectively since 2009. Canada's mandatory retirement at seventy-five and Australia's at seventy produce average tenures in a comparable range. These are not theoretical projections; they are functioning constitutional democracies where twelve-year judicial terms have demonstrated their adequacy.
Active service is not the full measure of judicial contribution. The eighteen-year proposals treat post-term service as an afterthought -- a graceful exit into semi-retirement. The Act treats it as a structurally necessary second career phase with real institutional functions. Senior Justices under the Act serve in the vacancy coverage pool, returning to the active Court when unexpected vacancies arise. They sit on circuit courts by designation. They adjudicate ethics complaints on the Ethics Review Panel. They provide institutional memory and continuity. These are not honorific functions; they are essential to the Court's operation under the Act's architecture.
This reframes the term-length question entirely. Twelve years of active service is not the total period of judicial contribution -- it is the period of peak active service, followed by a Senior Justice phase of continued, meaningful service. A justice appointed at fifty-five transitions to Senior status at sixty-seven, with potentially decades of additional service ahead in the vacancy pool, on circuit courts, and on the Ethics Review Panel. Under an eighteen-year term, that same justice transitions at seventy-three -- an age at which health limitations increasingly constrain the very functions the system depends on. If the Act needs a robust vacancy coverage pool and a functioning Ethics Review Panel composed of vigorous former justices, it needs those justices to reach Senior status while they are still capable of serving. Waiting until the late seventies or eighties to populate these structural roles is a disservice to real institutional needs.
The democratic accountability argument favors shorter terms. Supreme Court justices hold positions of extraordinary power without democratic accountability. On the current nine-seat Court, five justices can override the expressed will of the entire elected government -- nullifying legislation that passed both chambers of Congress and received presidential signature, overturning the democratic choices of millions as expressed through their representatives. This is an immense concentration of authority in individuals who face no electoral check whatsoever.
The question the term-length debate should center is not "how long is long enough to insulate justices from political pressure" -- the framing that produces eighteen years as a comfortable compromise. The question is: how long should unelected officials hold this magnitude of power before the democratic system receives a structured opportunity to recalibrate? Framed in these terms, twelve years is generous, not stingy. And the Act's fifteen-seat Court further diffuses this power -- it takes eight votes rather than five to form a majority, meaning no single appointment carries the same constitutional leverage that makes the current system so volatile.
The fifteen-seat context changes the calculus. With fifteen justices, a twelve-year term produces biennial appointments -- the same cadence that an eighteen-year term produces on a nine-seat Court. The democratic responsiveness function is thus comparable. Where the Act's shorter term produces a real difference is in total tenure of active influence for any individual justice. On a nine-seat Court, this shorter tenure would intensify the concern Chilton et al. raise about compositional "whiplash." But on a fifteen-seat Court, any single appointment's impact on the overall median is diluted by roughly forty percent compared to a nine-seat Court. The larger bench absorbs turnover that would produce sharp swings on a smaller Court.
The Act's twelve-year term also reduces the final-period problem (discussed below in Design Decision 6) by shortening the period during which a justice knows their departure is imminent, and by providing an affirmative institutional role (the Co-Chief Justice capstone) during the final two years of active service.
Assessment: The Act's twelve-year active service period is not a concession to political feasibility or a reluctant departure from an established consensus. It is a principled position supported by comparative institutional evidence, grounded in democratic accountability concerns, and structurally integrated with the Senior Justice career phase that provides continued judicial contribution beyond active service. The eighteen-year consensus deserves scrutiny it has not received; it reflects the mathematical constraints of a nine-seat Court and the political logic of compromise more than a rigorous analysis of how long unelected officials should exercise unchecked constitutional authority. The combination of twelve-year active terms, a fifteen-seat bench, and a structurally robust Senior Justice phase produces a system that is more democratically responsive, more institutionally functional, and more honest about the nature of the power it regulates than any eighteen-year proposal in the literature.
2. Appointment Timing¶
Chilton et al. note several options for when appointments occur: every two years in the first and third year of a presidential term, natural expiration without regularization, or nominations at any time with delayed effect.
The Act establishes biennial appointments in odd-numbered years, regularized by statute. This is the most structured approach in the literature. What distinguishes the Act from other proposals is the Appointment Equalization mechanism (Section 202(d)), which addresses a mathematical asymmetry that other proposals overlook. Because the Act's fifteen-seat, twelve-year structure does not reduce to a clean "two appointments per presidential term," the biennial schedule produces periods where three positions become available in a single odd-numbered year. Left unaddressed, this would create appointment windfalls for whichever president happened to serve during high-appointment periods -- reproducing precisely the actuarial randomness the reform is designed to eliminate.
The borrowing mechanism ensures that beginning in Year 21 of the schedule, each four-year presidential term includes exactly five appointment opportunities. No other proposal in the literature achieves this level of mathematical precision in equalizing appointment opportunities across presidential terms.
Assessment: Excellent. The Act achieves appointment regularity superior to any proposal Chilton et al. evaluate, and the equalization mechanism addresses a design gap -- the potential for structural windfalls during transition -- that their simulations identify as a significant concern.
3. Transition Timing¶
This is one of two design features Chilton et al. identify as producing the most significant differences across proposals. Their simulations demonstrate that proposals commencing term-limited appointments immediately could complete the transition in an average of sixteen years, while those delaying until all sitting justices depart take an average of fifty-two years and as long as sixty-nine.
The Act begins immediately upon enactment. The first expansion appointment occurs in the first odd-numbered year at least eighteen months after the effective date, with subsequent expansion appointments in each odd-numbered year until all fifteen positions are filled. This places the Act firmly in the "immediate implementation" category that the Chilton simulations identify as most effective.
However, the Act's transition is modulated by Court expansion rather than direct replacement. Existing justices are not displaced. Instead, new seats are added alongside the existing nine, reaching fifteen over approximately twelve years. This means the full fifteen-seat, twelve-year cycle does not begin producing regular vacancies until approximately Year 13 -- when the first expansion-appointed justices complete their active service and transition to Senior Justice status. The transition to full steady-state operation thus takes approximately twenty-one years, somewhat longer than the sixteen-year average the Chilton simulations produce for the fastest proposals.
This is a meaningful tradeoff. The Chilton framework strongly favors rapid transition because delayed proposals perpetuate the unequal appointment opportunities that reform is designed to fix. The Act's approach accepts a longer transition in exchange for a constitutionally safer mechanism (expansion rather than mandatory displacement) and reduced political disruption (no sitting justice is removed).
Assessment: Good, but not the fastest possible. The Act begins appointing term-limited justices immediately, which the Chilton framework identifies as the most important variable. But the expansion-based mechanism means full steady-state operation takes longer to achieve than proposals that directly replace sitting justices. The Foundational Principles document characterizes this as a deliberate choice reflecting the principle that "reforms designed for future generations can accept transitional irregularities that diminish over time." The Chilton framework would prefer a faster transition, and this is a fair criticism that the Act accepts as the cost of a constitutionally conservative approach.
4. Legacy Justices¶
Chilton et al. note that proposals must decide whether sitting justices at the time of enactment will be subject to the new term limits. They observe that limiting legacy justices may have implications for the constitutionality of any reform passed by statute.
The Act takes a generous approach: legacy justices may continue in active service indefinitely, unaffected by the three-phase career structure. The Act offers -- but does not require -- a voluntary opt-in mechanism (Section 403(d)) that allows existing Associate Justices to elect the Act's career structure. Opting in provides the honor of Co-Chief Justice service (otherwise unavailable to legacy justices) and a dignified career arc in exchange for accepting the twelve-year active service limit. But opting out carries no negative consequence.
This is the most constitutionally conservative approach to legacy justices in the literature. The Renewal Act similarly protects legacy justices but delays all reform until they depart. The Act avoids this delay by adding new seats alongside existing ones. The Khanna Bill begins implementing immediately but subjects legacy justices to the new system, raising constitutional objections that the Act avoids.
The tradeoff is that legacy justices may remain on the Court for decades during the transition, potentially producing a Court with both legacy life-tenure justices and twelve-year term-limited justices serving simultaneously. The Chilton framework would note that this creates a two-track system during the transition period, which complicates the compositional dynamics their simulations model.
Assessment: Constitutionally strong, operationally complex. The voluntary opt-in is a creative mechanism not found in any of the proposals Chilton et al. evaluate. It respects the constitutional concerns they identify while providing incentives for legacy justices to transition voluntarily. The Chilton framework would flag the potential for a prolonged two-track system as a weakness, but the Act's expansion mechanism means this does not delay the onset of regularized appointments.
5. Unexpected Vacancies¶
This is the second design feature Chilton et al. identify as producing the most significant differences across proposals. Their simulations find that eleven percent of temporary appointments under some proposals would occur in exactly the conditions that led to the Garland blockade -- the last year of a presidential term with the Senate controlled by the opposing party. They evaluate two main approaches: filling unexpected vacancies with new presidential appointments for the remainder of the term, or covering vacancies with senior justices until the next scheduled appointment.
The Act adopts the senior justice coverage model and implements it with exceptional structural rigor. Section 205 establishes a vacancy coverage rotation system: when an active-service vacancy occurs, the Administrative Office conducts a random lottery from the vacancy coverage roster to assign a Senior Justice to serve in the vacant seat for each October Term until the seat is filled at its next regularly scheduled biennial appointment. The critical structural principle is that vacancies do not create presidential appointment opportunities.
Several design features deserve emphasis. The random lottery prevents gaming of rotation assignments. The per-October-Term assignment ensures fresh selection each year. The pool-exhaustion cycling rule distributes the burden fairly. The health and incapacity exemption protects Senior Justices from compelled service.
The Chilton simulations demonstrate why this matters. Proposals that create new presidential appointment opportunities for unexpected vacancies reproduce the actuarial randomness the reform is designed to eliminate. Under the Act, the balanced schedule is protected: a president does not gain additional appointments because a justice dies unexpectedly.
The Act's approach is more structurally robust than the comparable mechanism in the Amar Time-Rule proposal, which relies on senior justices but does not specify the selection mechanism with the same precision. The Khanna Bill uses a similar senior fill-in concept but with less detail about rotation procedures.
Assessment: The Act provides the most detailed and structurally sound vacancy coverage mechanism in the literature. The Chilton framework identifies this design decision as critically important, and the Act's response is its strongest. The random lottery, per-Term assignment, and cycling rules address implementation details that other proposals leave unspecified.
6. Senior Justices¶
Chilton et al. note that proposals using senior status for term-limited justices raise questions about what role former active justices should play. The Act's three-phase career structure provides the most comprehensive answer in the literature.
Senior Justices under the Act retain full Article III protections, life tenure, and full compensation. They may continue hearing cases, sit on circuit courts by designation, serve on the Ethics Review Panel, participate in vacancy coverage rotation, or decline discretionary assignments without penalty. The transition to Senior Justice status is a change in duty assignment, not in tenure -- the constitutional distinction at the heart of the Amar framework that provides the Act's statutory basis.
Regarding the final-period problem that Chilton et al. identify -- the concern that justices nearing the end of their terms may adjust their behavior in anticipation of future employment -- the Act's structure provides some mitigation. First, the twelve-year active service period means justices transition at a relatively advanced age (assuming appointment in their fifties or early sixties, they transition in their late sixties or seventies). As Oliver observes, at these ages many justices are unlikely to have ambitious post-Court career plans. Second, the transition to Senior Justice status rather than full departure reduces the sharpness of the "final period" -- justices are not leaving the judiciary entirely but moving to a different role within it. Third, the Co-Chief Justice phase (years eleven and twelve) provides an affirmative institutional role during the final period, potentially reducing the temptation to signal to future employers through voting behavior.
Chilton et al. find that in forty-two percent of years under term limits, a justice in the majority of a 5-4 partisan split would be in their final year on the bench. On a fifteen-seat Court, this concern is somewhat diluted: the dynamics of a 5-4 split are less likely on a larger bench, and the marginal vote has less leverage when the Court's overall composition is more dispersed.
Assessment: Strong. The Act's three-phase career structure provides a more complete answer to the senior justice question than any proposal in the Chilton framework. The Co-Chief Justice capstone phase is a structural innovation that addresses final-period incentive concerns through institutional design rather than relying on norms or assumptions about justice behavior.
7. Senate Impasses¶
This is where the Act makes its most significant contribution relative to the existing literature, and where the Chilton framework reveals the most critical gap in every prior proposal.
Chilton et al. demonstrate empirically that sixty-two to seventy-five percent of Court vacancies under the five major proposals would arise during divided government. They conclude that some method for handling Senate impasse is necessary if term-limits reform is to accomplish its goals. Yet none of the five proposals they evaluate provides a structurally adequate solution. The Khanna Bill's 120-day automatic seating provision addresses inaction but, as the authors note, would not prevent the Senate from simply voting down nominees. The other proposals either lack impasse provisions entirely or propose mechanisms the authors themselves characterize as inadequate.
The Act replaces the binary single-nominee confirmation model entirely with slate-based nomination and Bloc STAR voting (Section 202). Rather than submitting one nominee for an up-or-down vote -- a structure that concentrates maximum leverage in the Senate's ability to reject -- the President submits a slate of multiple qualified candidates, and the Senate selects from among them using a scored voting procedure in which each senator assigns each nominee a score from 0 to 5.
This transformation addresses the structural vulnerability at its source rather than bolting on remedial provisions. Several features warrant emphasis in the Chilton context.
First, the slate structure transforms the Senate's incentive from adversarial gatekeeping to collaborative selection. Under the binary model, blocking a single nominee costs the Senate nothing. Under the slate model, refusing to participate in scored voting means forgoing the ability to shape which nominee is selected. Both majority and minority senators have structural incentives to engage because participation yields influence over outcomes while obstruction does not.
Second, the Senate retains constitutional authority to reject an entire slate, but the architecture makes this strategically irrational. Rejection triggers presidential resubmission within thirty days with excluded nominees, gaining the Senate nothing while consuming political capital. The Policy Rationale describes this as an "ornamental gun" -- the authority is preserved but rendered structurally irrational to exercise. This is a fundamentally different approach from the Khanna Bill's automatic seating, which circumvents the Senate's constitutional role, or the penalty mechanisms other proposals suggest, which raise the constitutional concerns Chilton et al. identify.
Third, the 120-day mandatory consideration timeline (Section 202(g)) applies to the Bloc STAR vote or slate rejection, not to a traditional confirmation vote. This is a hybrid model: Congress mandates that the Senate act within 120 days (analogous to budget reconciliation timelines and War Powers Resolution consideration periods), but leaves internal procedural mechanics to Senate rules. The Act thus threads the constitutional needle between mandating that the Senate act and dictating how it organizes itself to do so.
The Chilton authors candidly acknowledge that the Senate impasse problem remained unsolved: "these solutions are only a couple of possibilities; no doubt there are others." The slate-based Bloc STAR mechanism is one such "other" -- a structural innovation that the framework's authors anticipated was needed but had not yet been proposed.
Assessment: The Act provides the most structurally complete response to the Senate impasse problem in the literature. The Chilton framework identifies this as one of the most critical design gaps across all existing proposals. The slate-based Bloc STAR mechanism addresses the problem through incentive transformation rather than enforcement or circumvention, a structural approach consistent with the Act's broader design philosophy of preferring structures over norms. This is the Act's single strongest advantage relative to every proposal Chilton et al. evaluate.
8. Chief Justices¶
Chilton et al. note that proposals should decide how the Chief Justice will be designated. They identify several options: appointment to fill the departing Chief's vacancy, seniority-based selection, party-based selection, a system modeled on circuit courts, or internal election.
The Act introduces a model that none of these options anticipate: shared Co-Chief Justice leadership. Multiple justices serve simultaneously as Co-Chief Justices during their final two years of active service (years eleven and twelve), sharing administrative responsibilities pursuant to Judicial Conference rules. The President designates one Co-Chief Justice as Ceremonial Chief Justice to exercise constitutionally specified functions such as presiding over presidential impeachment trials.
This approach addresses a concern that the Chilton framework identifies but does not fully develop. Under the status quo, the Chief Justice position concentrates immense power -- chairing the Judicial Conference, appointing judges to specialized courts, managing budget requests, assigning opinions -- in one individual for decades based on presidential selection and actuarial chance. The Chilton framework treats Chief Justice designation as primarily a procedural question, but the Act treats it as a structural power-distribution question.
The Co-Chief Justice model diffuses concentrated power while preserving a constitutionally required singular designation for ceremonial functions. Every justice who completes a full term serves as Co-Chief Justice, democratizing an honor and responsibility that the current system distributes based on happenstance. The Foundational Principles document identifies this as an application of the "diffusion of power" principle: concentrated power invites abuse; distributed power promotes accountability.
Assessment: The Act's Co-Chief Justice model exceeds the design space the Chilton framework maps. No proposal they evaluate addresses the concentration-of-power problem that the Chief Justice position creates. The shared leadership model is an innovation that the framework would benefit from incorporating as an additional design dimension: not just how to designate the Chief, but whether the role's power should be distributed.
9. Enactment Method¶
Chilton et al. distinguish between statutory and constitutional amendment approaches. The Act is a statute, not a constitutional amendment. Its constitutional basis rests on Congress's Article III authority to organize the federal judiciary and the Necessary and Proper Clause. The core constitutional theory -- that Congress may regulate judicial duties without terminating judicial tenure -- draws from Akhil Reed Amar's originalist analysis of Article III.
The statutory approach is the same method used by the Amar Time-Rule, the Renewal Act, the Justices on Deck proposal, and the Khanna Bill. The Act shares with these proposals the advantage of requiring only a simple congressional majority rather than the supermajority threshold for constitutional amendments. It also shares the vulnerability to constitutional challenge, though the Legal Analysis document provides detailed assessment of the Act's prospects for surviving judicial review.
Assessment: Consistent with the statutory approach used by the strongest proposals in the Chilton framework. The Act's constitutional theory is well-developed and benefits from the practice of Supreme Court justices themselves transitioning to hearing cases on lower courts under existing 28 U.S.C. Section 371 authority.
Part II: Evaluation Against Empirical Findings¶
Beyond the nine design decisions, Chilton et al. produce several empirical findings through their simulations that merit evaluation against the Act.
Transition Speed and Compositional Effects¶
Chilton et al. find that faster-transitioning proposals complete the shift to regularized appointments in an average of sixteen years, while slower proposals take fifty-two years on average. The Act's expansion-based mechanism places it between these extremes -- immediate commencement of new appointments, but full steady-state operation approximately twenty-one years from enactment. This is slower than the UVA Plan's sixteen-year average but dramatically faster than the Renewal Act's fifty-two-year average or the Northwestern Plan's average of fifty-two years (with some simulations reaching sixty-nine).
Ideological Balance¶
The Chilton simulations find that extreme party imbalance (one party controlling seven or more of nine seats) occurred in 59.5 percent of years from 1937 to 2020. All five major proposals would have reduced this, with medians ranging from 27.5 percent (Khanna Bill) to 41.2 percent (Justices on Deck). The Act's fifteen-seat Court changes the denominator of this calculation. On a fifteen-seat Court, extreme imbalance would require one party to control eleven or more seats -- a higher threshold that should, in principle, be more difficult to achieve under regularized appointments. The larger Court size thus provides an additional structural buffer against extreme compositional imbalance beyond what any nine-seat proposal achieves.
Enactment Windfalls¶
Chilton et al. assess whether the transition to term limits would create windfalls for the presidents who happen to serve closest to enactment. The Act's phased expansion -- one seat per odd-numbered year over approximately twelve years -- deliberately distributes expansion appointments across multiple administrations. No single president fills more than two or three seats during the expansion phase. This directly addresses the enactment windfall concern, though the magnitude of mitigation depends on which party controls the presidency during the early expansion years.
Justice-Years Per Presidential Term¶
The Chilton simulations measure the number of justice-years (justice-count multiplied by years of service) produced per presidential term as a measure of each president's influence over the Court. Under life tenure, this metric varies enormously across presidencies. Under term limits, the variation narrows considerably. The Act's Appointment Equalization mechanism produces the tightest possible distribution at steady state: exactly five appointment opportunities per presidential term. No proposal in the Chilton framework achieves this level of mathematical precision.
Part III: Features Beyond the Chilton Framework¶
The Chilton framework provides an excellent lens for evaluating proposals that regulate the timing and tenure of Supreme Court service. But the Act addresses structural problems that extend beyond the framework's scope. Several of these features serve the same ultimate goals -- reducing arbitrary influence, promoting institutional legitimacy, preventing power concentration -- but through mechanisms the framework does not anticipate.
Principled Court Sizing¶
Every proposal in the Chilton framework assumes a nine-seat Court. The Act expands to fifteen seats, but unlike historical court-packing, the expansion is tied to a principled basis: one justice per population-based regional circuit, restoring the historical relationship between circuit organization and Court size. The Foundational Principles document frames this as an application of the "principled derivation" principle: the number was not chosen; it was derived from the population equity mathematics underlying the circuit reorganization.
This matters for the Chilton framework's implicit concern about institutional legitimacy. Chilton et al. note that term limits are partly intended to reduce the political stakes of individual appointments. Court expansion can serve this goal by diluting the impact of any single appointment. But expansion without a principled basis invites an arms race -- the next majority can add more seats. The Act's circuit-aligned ceiling constrains future manipulation in a way that unprincipled expansion does not.
Evidence-Based Transparency Requirements¶
No proposal in the Chilton framework addresses the quality of information available to the Senate during the confirmation process. The Act's Title III requires nominees to submit at least ten self-selected works of substantial legal analysis, a judicial philosophy statement, and professional biography -- all publicly available within seventy-two hours. This does not directly address any of the nine design decisions, but it serves the broader institutional goal of ensuring that the regularized appointment process produces evaluable justices rather than strategic unknowns.
Under the slate-based nomination model, transparency requirements take on additional importance. When the Senate is selecting among multiple nominees rather than rendering a binary judgment on one, the quality and comparability of information about each nominee becomes essential to meaningful selection. The documentation requirements are calibrated for this multi-nominee evaluation context: sufficient to enable genuine comparison without being so burdensome as to limit the nomination pool.
Binding Ethics Enforcement¶
The Chilton framework does not address judicial ethics, but the Act's Title V binding ethics enforcement serves goals cognate to those term limits pursue. One argument for term limits is that they prevent justices from serving so long that they become unaccountable. Ethics enforcement addresses a different dimension of accountability: ensuring that justices who violate binding standards face meaningful consequences regardless of how long they serve.
The graduated sanction structure -- from private admonition through public censure, mandatory recusal, and administrative reassignment to Mandatory Early Transition to Senior Justice status -- operates within the same constitutional framework as the career structure itself. Mandatory Early Transition is a sanction that changes duty assignment while preserving tenure, the same Article III analysis that supports the three-phase career structure.
The Ethics Review Panel composed of Senior Justices ensures that the adjudicators are peers of equal constitutional stature rather than external regulators. The Bridge Panel (retired circuit chief judges selected by lottery) provides transitional capacity before enough expansion-appointed Senior Justices are available. The Judicial Inspector General provides independent investigation capacity with structural protections for independence: nominating committee selection, ten-year non-renewable term, and unanimous removal protection.
Circuit Reorganization as Structural Foundation¶
The Chilton framework treats the size of the Court as given. The Act treats it as derived. The population-based circuit reorganization in Title I provides the structural foundation for the Court expansion in Title II -- and in doing so, creates a principled basis that constrains both the initial expansion and future manipulation.
Fifteen circuits derive from the minimum number needed to satisfy the Act's population equity requirements (no circuit serving more than 110% or less than 90% of the average circuit population) while maintaining geographic contiguity. Computational modeling demonstrates that this tolerance band requires at least fifteen circuits to achieve population balance across eighty-nine federal judicial districts. The Act's Foundational Principles document captures this: "We didn't pick 15 -- 15 picked us!"
This principled derivation provides a structural defense against the court-packing accusation that haunts any expansion proposal. The circuit-aligned rationale limits the Court's size to the number of regional circuits rather than leaving it open to future manipulation.
Interaction with Coalition Governance¶
The Act exists within APAI's broader Congressional Modernization Framework, which includes electoral reforms designed to create coalition governance conditions. The Policy Rationale notes that the Act's transitional irregularities would be mitigated in a multiparty environment. The slate-based nomination process is particularly well-suited to coalition governance: a president can include nominees favored by different coalition partners within a single slate, accommodating the collaborative dynamics that coalition government requires.
This interaction extends beyond the Chilton framework's scope, but it reflects a systemic design philosophy that distinguishes the Act from proposals developed in isolation. The Chilton authors evaluate each proposal as a standalone reform; the Act is designed to function both independently and as part of a comprehensive institutional architecture.
Comparative Summary¶
The following table positions the Act against the Chilton framework alongside the proposals they evaluate.
| Design Decision | Amar Time-Rule | Renewal Act | Justices on Deck | Khanna Bill | FJBAA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Term Length | 18 years | 18 years | 18 years | 18 years | 12 years (15-seat Court) |
| Appointment Timing | Biennial | Biennial (after transition) | Biennial | Biennial | Biennial with Equalization |
| Transition Timing | Fast | Very Slow | Moderate | Fast | Fast (expansion-based) |
| Legacy Justices | Retain life tenure | Retain life tenure | Retain life tenure | Retain but managed | Retain with voluntary opt-in |
| Unexpected Vacancies | Senior status | Remainder of term | Wait-on-deck | Senior fill-in | Senior lottery rotation |
| Senior Justice Role | Limited | Not applicable until transition | Wait-on-deck | Limited | Three-phase career with ethics, vacancy coverage |
| Senate Impasse | None | None | None | 120-day auto-seat | Slate-based Bloc STAR voting |
| Chief Justice | Not specified | Not specified | Not specified | Not specified | Shared Co-Chief Justice |
| Enactment Method | Statute | Statute | Statute | Statute | Statute |
Comparative Assessment¶
The Chilton framework's central empirical finding is that transition speed and vacancy handling are the two design decisions producing the most significant differences across proposals. The Act performs well on both: immediate commencement of term-limited appointments (though slower to full steady-state than direct replacement proposals) and the most structurally detailed vacancy coverage mechanism in the literature.
On the dimension the Chilton authors identify as the most critical unresolved problem -- Senate impasse -- the Act provides the only structural solution that transforms incentives rather than attempting to enforce compliance or circumvent constitutional authority. The authors' candid acknowledgment that the problem remained unsolved provides strong validation for the Act's approach.
The Act's principal vulnerability under the Chilton framework is the twelve-year active service period, which produces faster turnover than the eighteen-year consensus. However, as discussed in Part I, the consensus itself rests on thin justification -- a mathematical convenience for a nine-seat Court rather than a principled analysis of democratic accountability. The fifteen-seat Court partially offsets turnover effects by diluting any single appointment's impact, and the structurally robust Senior Justice phase means that twelve years of active service is not the total period of judicial contribution. The interaction between shorter terms, a larger bench, and an active Senior Justice career phase has not been empirically modeled using the Chilton methodology, which represents the most productive avenue for further analysis.
Areas Requiring Further Analysis¶
The Chilton simulation methodology could be adapted to model the Act's specific parameters -- fifteen seats, twelve-year terms, biennial appointments with equalization, expansion-based transition -- and produce the same compositional and ideological balance analyses the authors generate for the five proposals they evaluate. Such modeling would provide empirical evidence on several questions this evaluation cannot answer analytically: how the larger Court affects the frequency and magnitude of ideological swings, whether the expansion-based transition creates compositional dynamics comparable to the direct-replacement proposals, and how the twelve-year term interacts with realistic appointment ages to affect the final-period problem.
The interaction between slate-based Bloc STAR voting and ideological composition is another area where simulation could provide insights. The Chilton simulations assume that each president nominates justices who share the president's ideological orientation. Under the slate model, the Senate's selection among multiple nominees introduces a moderating dynamic that the binary model does not -- senators of both parties shape the outcome through scored voting. Modeling this would require assumptions about how Bloc STAR voting affects the ideological position of selected justices relative to the appointing president, which is an open empirical question.
Conclusion¶
The Act responds to the Chilton et al. framework comprehensively, addressing all nine design decisions and providing particularly strong responses on the dimensions the authors identify as most critical: transition timing, unexpected vacancy handling, and Senate impasse. Its principal innovations relative to the proposals Chilton et al. evaluate -- slate-based Bloc STAR voting, shared Co-Chief Justice leadership, vacancy coverage rotation with random lottery, appointment equalization, binding ethics enforcement, and principled circuit-aligned Court sizing -- represent an expansion of the design space rather than merely an optimization within it.
The Act's most notable departure from the Chilton framework's implicit assumptions is the twelve-year active service period, which challenges the eighteen-year consensus on principled grounds: comparative institutional evidence, democratic accountability proportional to the power exercised, and the structural necessity of a vigorous Senior Justice corps. The voluntary opt-in for legacy justices is constitutionally conservative but operationally complex, and the expansion-based transition is somewhat slower to reach full steady-state operation than direct replacement proposals.
These tradeoffs reflect the Act's broader design philosophy, expressed in the Foundational Principles document as a preference for "structures over norms" and "rough bricks over perfect crystals." The Act accepts imperfection in individual dimensions in exchange for a comprehensive architecture that addresses structural problems beyond the scope of any single term-limits proposal. The Chilton framework provides the most rigorous available tool for evaluating proposals within the term-limits design space; the Act's ambition is to operate in a larger design space that includes -- but is not limited to -- regularized appointments.
Notes on Sources and Citations¶
This evaluation draws on the following primary sources:
Chilton et al. Framework: Adam Chilton, Daniel Epps, Kyle Rozema & Maya Sen, "Designing Supreme Court Term Limits," 95 Southern California Law Review 1 (2021). The nine design decisions framework appears at pages 22-26. Simulation methodology is described at pages 34-37. Key empirical findings on transition speed appear at pages 40-42, ideological balance at pages 47-49, and final-period problems at pages 60-69.
Amar Time-Rule: Akhil Reed Amar, "Term Limits/Time Rules for Future Justices," Cato Supreme Court Review (2023). Available at https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2023-09/cato-supreme-court-review-1.pdf. The Act's constitutional theory draws significantly from Amar's distinction between regulating judicial duties and terminating judicial tenure.
Khanna Bill: H.R. 8424, 116th Congress. The strongest statutory proposal under the Chilton framework, particularly for its 120-day automatic seating provision addressing Senate obstruction.
FJBAA Supporting Documents: Policy Rationale (Rev 2.1), Foundational Principles (Rev 1.7), Legal Analysis (Rev 2.1), Overview (Rev 2.1), and Implementation Timeline (Rev 2.1) provide the substantive basis for the Act's design choices discussed throughout this evaluation.
Comparative Proposals: The Renewal Act (Carrington & Cramton, 2006), Justices on Deck (Fix the Court, 2020), Oliver Plan (1986), UVA Plan, and Northwestern Plan are evaluated as documented in the prepared research summary, "Supreme Court Term Limits -- Comparative Guide with Pros/Cons and Chilton et al Evaluation" (2025).
Revision History¶
Revision 1.0 (Current) - Initial publication - Comprehensive evaluation of FJBAA Rev 2.2 against all nine Chilton et al. design decisions - Comparative analysis with Amar Time-Rule, Renewal Act, Justices on Deck, and Khanna Bill - Assessment of Act features beyond the Chilton framework: principled Court sizing, transparency requirements, ethics enforcement, Co-Chief Justice leadership, and circuit reorganization - Identification of areas requiring further empirical modeling
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Prepared by Albert Ramos for The American Policy Architecture Institute