Alzheimer's disease, retirement 'pacts,' and serving until you're 104 years old: Inside the federal judiciary's reckoning with age
After several years on the federal trial court in Manhattan, Shira Scheindlin began noticing signs that some of her senior colleagues were losing sharpness in their old age. She wasn't the only one.
And so, in her early 50s, Scheindlin found herself making a pact with two of her fellow judges: They would tell one another if they felt it was time for one of them to retire.
"I had seen too many judges stay too long," Scheindlin said. "It's a problem. It's just a problem. Some judges get too old to do it well."
Across the federal courts, other judges have quietly struck up similar ways to initiate retirement conversations if a colleague's sharpness dulls or competency wanes. The informal, if imperfect, arrangements reflect an awareness that age can affect the performance of federal judges, whose lifetime tenures come with the pitfall of growing doddery to the detriment not only to their own legacies but also to the functioning of the legal system and those subjected to it.
