Federal Judicial Balance and Accountability Act¶
Emergent Benefits of Principled Design¶
Published February 2026¶
Based on Rev 2.2 of the Federal Judicial Balance and Accountability Act (FJBAA), hereafter "the Act"
Introduction¶
Institutional design that begins from first principles sometimes produces advantages beyond those the designer set out to achieve. The Act was not designed to optimize ideological balance on the Supreme Court. It was designed to realize eight foundational principles -- equality, fairness, balance, accountability, dignity, predictability, diffusion of power, and principled derivation -- within the constraints of constitutional structure. Yet the resulting appointment architecture produces a powerful secondary effect: it functions as a moving average of judicial philosophy, preventing the ideological clustering that characterizes the contemporary Court.
This paper examines that emergent benefit. It describes the pathologies of the current system, explains how the Act's principled design dissolves them, and argues that the moving average effect illustrates a broader lesson about institutional engineering: when you build from sound principles, you often discover that the structure you have created solves problems you did not initially set out to address.
The Current System: Punctuated Equilibrium¶
The Supreme Court's ideological composition changes the way ecosystems change in the theory of punctuated equilibrium: long periods of stasis interrupted by sudden, dramatic shifts. A Court can remain locked into a particular ideological configuration for a decade or more, then transform within a few years when multiple vacancies happen to cluster.
This pattern is not a design choice. It is an accident of the current system's dependence on actuarial chance -- on when individual justices happen to die, retire, or become incapacitated. The result is a Court whose jurisprudence can remain frozen at a particular intellectual moment long after that moment has passed, and whose ideological transitions, when they come, arrive with disruptive force. Modern justices routinely serve for thirty or forty years, more than double the average tenure of 14.9 years from the Court's establishment through 1969.
Generational Lock-In¶
Justices are products of the eras in which they were educated and came of legal age. The constitutional questions that dominated their law school curricula, the scholarly debates that shaped their formative years, and the cultural assumptions they absorbed during their early careers all leave marks on their jurisprudence. This is natural and unremarkable in any single justice. It becomes a structural problem when multiple justices share the same formative era and remain on the bench together for decades.
A Court dominated by justices educated in the 1970s and 1980s carries particular assumptions about the relationship between federal and state power, the scope of executive authority, and the role of precedent. Those assumptions may have been well-grounded in the constitutional scholarship of their time. But constitutional scholarship evolves. New questions arise. Old questions acquire new dimensions. When the Court's composition prevents contemporary scholarship from finding representation on the bench, the institution loses its capacity to engage with the full range of constitutional argument available to it.
The Presidential Lottery¶
Some presidents shape the Court profoundly; others leave no mark at all. Between 1937 and 2020, presidential appointment counts ranged from zero -- Carter's single term produced no appointments -- to five in Roosevelt's second term. This variation bears no relationship to democratic mandate. A president who wins a landslide may appoint no justices. A president who wins narrowly may appoint three. The distribution of appointments reflects mortality tables, not electoral outcomes.
The consequences extend beyond individual presidencies. When one party happens to control the White House during a period of clustered vacancies, that party's judicial philosophy dominates the Court for a generation -- not because the electorate chose that outcome, but because the actuarial dice fell favorably. The opposing party's voters, who may have won subsequent elections, find their presidents unable to register any influence on the Court's composition.
Ideological Clustering in Practice¶
The pathology is visible in both directions. The Warren and early Burger Courts reflected a liberal consensus sustained by a remarkable run of Democratic appointments. Conservatives spent decades arguing that the Court had departed from the constitutional text and original understanding, yet found the institution immune to electoral correction. The contemporary Court reflects the mirror image -- a conservative majority consolidated through clustered Republican appointments that progressives view as having departed from established precedent and the broader trajectory of the nation's constitutional development, with equally little recourse through the ballot box. In both eras, the losing side's frustration was structurally identical: a Court captured by a particular ideological moment, sustained not by continued democratic endorsement but by the accident of when vacancies happened to arise.
The Act's designers did not set out to render judgment on any particular Court's jurisprudence. The point is that the current system produces Courts whose ideological composition bears no principled relationship to the democratic preferences of the nation as expressed through presidential elections over time. The composition is an artifact of when people happened to die or retire -- nothing more.
Building from First Principles¶
The Act did not begin by asking how to fix ideological clustering. It began by asking what foundational principles a well-functioning judiciary should honor, and then building structures to realize those principles within constitutional constraints. The moving average effect emerged from that process as a discovered benefit -- not a targeted design goal.
The derivation proceeded through three interlocking principles, each building on the last.
Principle One: Equal Circuit Populations¶
The existing circuit system creates population disparities approaching 5:1. The Ninth Circuit serves over 68 million people; the First Circuit serves under 14 million. These disparities produce unequal workloads, inconsistent case processing, and fundamentally unequal access to federal justice.
The Act's response begins with the foundational commitment that citizens should have roughly equal access to federal justice regardless of where they reside. Working from 2020 Census data and using federal judicial districts as building blocks, the Act constructs circuits of approximately equal population within a tolerance band of plus or minus 10%. The mathematical optimization across 89 federal judicial districts produces fifteen regional circuits -- not because fifteen was chosen, but because fifteen is what the population data and geographic constraints require. As the design process revealed: the number was not picked; it picked itself.
Principle Two: One Justice Per Circuit¶
The historical practice of assigning one Supreme Court justice to each circuit prevailed for decades after the founding. Six justices served six circuits. Nine justices served nine circuits. The Act restores this relationship: fifteen circuits, fifteen justices.
This is not an arbitrary expansion of the Court. It is the principled consequence of aligning Court size with circuit organization -- the same logic that determined Court size for most of American history. The fifteen-seat Court follows from population equity, not from any desire to pack or reshape the bench.
Principle Three: Scheduled Appointments¶
If fifteen justices serve twelve-year active terms with biennial appointments, the mathematics of the appointment schedule become deterministic rather than actuarial. Every odd-numbered year of the appointment schedule brings predictable transitions. The appointment equalization mechanism ensures that once the system reaches steady state, each four-year presidential term includes exactly five appointment opportunities -- distributed evenly and predictably regardless of which party controls the White House.
This is where the three principles converge. Equal populations require fifteen circuits. Historical precedent links Court size to circuit count. Scheduled appointments replace actuarial chance with mathematical certainty. None of these principles was adopted to produce ideological balance. Each was adopted on its own merits. But together, they produce something remarkable.
The Moving Average Effect¶
In statistical analysis, a moving average smooths out short-term fluctuations in a data series by calculating the average value over a rolling window. It reveals underlying trends while dampening the noise of individual observations.
The Act's appointment schedule functions analogously. At steady state, the Court's fifteen justices will have been appointed by multiple presidents spanning both parties over the preceding twelve years. No single president can have appointed more than five of the fifteen active justices. The Court's ideological composition therefore reflects the accumulated judicial philosophies of recent presidential elections -- not the accident of when particular individuals happened to leave the bench.
Consider the mathematics. With five appointments per presidential term, a two-term president appoints ten of fifteen justices -- a substantial but not permanent influence. A single-term president appoints five. After that president leaves office, subsequent presidents begin replacing their appointees within a few years. The Court's composition drifts continuously, always incorporating fresh perspectives, always reflecting recent electoral outcomes.
This is fundamentally different from the current system's dynamics. Under the current system, a president who faces three vacancies in a single term can reshape the Court for thirty years. A president who faces no vacancies leaves no mark. The moving average mechanism eliminates both outcomes. Every president contributes to the Court's composition. No president dominates it indefinitely.
What the Moving Average Prevents¶
The moving average mechanism specifically prevents three pathologies that afflict the current system.
First, it prevents epochal Courts -- extended periods where a single ideological configuration dominates because vacancies happened to cluster during one party's control of the White House. Under the Act, the Court always includes justices appointed by recent presidents of both parties. A conservative-appointed majority cannot persist for decades without continued conservative electoral success, and vice versa.
Second, it prevents generational lock-in. Because justices transition to Senior Justice status after twelve years of active service, the Court continuously incorporates justices educated and formed in different eras. The constitutional scholarship of the 2020s will always share the bench with the scholarship of the 2030s. No single generation's assumptions can dominate unchallenged.
Third, it prevents the presidential lottery. Every administration receives the same number of appointment opportunities. Electoral mandates translate into proportional judicial influence -- not windfalls or shutouts based on actuarial luck.
What the Moving Average Preserves¶
The moving average effect does not eliminate ideological change on the Court. It channels that change through democratic mechanisms rather than demographic accident. If the nation elects conservative presidents for three consecutive terms, the Court will shift rightward -- as it should, because that shift reflects sustained democratic choice. If the nation then elects progressive presidents, the Court will shift back -- gradually, predictably, and proportionally.
This is not ideological stasis. It is ideological responsiveness filtered through the stabilizing mechanism of staggered terms. The Court reflects the nation's evolving constitutional preferences with a reasonable lag -- close enough to be democratically accountable, distant enough to prevent the Court from becoming a mirror of momentary electoral passion.
The Lesson of Emergent Design¶
The moving average effect was not a design target of the Act. It was discovered after the structure was built. The design process began with population equity and arrived at fifteen circuits. It drew on historical precedent and arrived at fifteen justices. It applied the principle of predictability and arrived at scheduled appointments. Only after these pieces were assembled did the moving average property become visible.
This sequence matters for two reasons.
First, it demonstrates intellectual honesty. The Act does not claim to have engineered ideological balance. It claims to have built from foundational principles and discovered that ideological balance emerged as a structural consequence. The distinction matters because it places the reform on firmer ground than any proposal that begins with a desired ideological outcome and works backward to justify a structure.
Second, it illustrates a broader principle of institutional design. Structures built from sound first principles tend to produce beneficial properties beyond those explicitly targeted. This is not coincidence. Principles like equality, fairness, and predictability are deeply interrelated. A system that honors one tends to honor others. A system designed for population equity that also produces ideological balance is not experiencing a lucky accident -- it is demonstrating the coherence of well-chosen principles.
The Act's designers did not set out to create a moving average. They set out to create a judiciary that honored foundational commitments to equality, fairness, and predictability. The moving average is what those commitments look like when translated into an appointment schedule. It is the structural expression of principles that, individually, say nothing about ideology -- but that, collectively, prevent any single ideology from capturing the institution.
Conclusion¶
The current Supreme Court appointment system produces ideological composition through actuarial chance. Vacancies cluster unpredictably. Presidents receive wildly unequal opportunities. The Court locks into particular ideological configurations for decades, disconnected from the evolving preferences of the electorate. These are not features of constitutional design -- they are artifacts of a system that never anticipated justices serving for thirty or forty years, tenures approaching and sometimes exceeding that of reigning monarchs.
The Act replaces this system with one built from first principles: equal circuit populations, one justice per circuit, scheduled appointments with equalized distribution. The resulting structure functions as a moving average of judicial philosophy -- continuously refreshing the Court's composition, preventing ideological clustering, and ensuring that the bench reflects the accumulated judgment of recent elections rather than the accumulated accidents of mortality.
This was discovered, not designed. And that is precisely the point. When institutional designers begin with sound principles rather than desired outcomes, the structures they build tend to solve problems they did not set out to address. The moving average effect is one such solution -- an emergent benefit of principled design that answers a real pathology in the current system without having been explicitly targeted.
The lesson extends beyond judicial reform. It suggests that the most durable institutional designs are those that derive from principle rather than expedience -- and that the surest sign of a well-designed system is that it produces advantages its designers did not anticipate.
Revision History¶
Revision 1.0 (Current) - Initial publication
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Prepared by Albert Ramos for The American Policy Architecture Institute