Supreme Court justice terms should end before age clouds reason

By Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe - In the summer of 1990, Supreme Court Justice William Brennan retired and President George H.W. Bush named US Court of Appeals Judge David Souter to succeed him. A few days later, Justice Thurgood Marshall fumed about the Souter nomination in an interview with ABC News correspondent Sam Donaldson. “When his name came down, I was listening to television,’’ Marshall said. “I called my wife and said, ‘Have I ever heard of this man?’ She said, ‘No.’ ’’ Marshall declared disdainfully that he didn’t have “the slightest idea’’ why Bush had nominated Souter. He could say nothing good about the president — in fact, he told Donaldson, “I consider him dead.’’ It was an embarrassing and unbecoming performance, and it exposed to public view what court insiders already knew: The once-formidable Marshall, then 82, was in serious decline — not only physically, but mentally. “Some people watching that interview,’’ Donaldson said when it aired, “will think that . . . he’s lost it.’’ He may not have fully “lost it,’’ but clearly Marshall was no longer a fully-engaged Supreme Court justice. He spent hours watching daytime TV and telling stories, leaving the writing of his opinions to law clerks. In his prime, Marshall had been a masterful litigator and the civil rights movement’s indispensable legal strategist. But by 1990 he seemed uninformed and disengaged," as one of Justice Lewis Powell’s clerks later wrote. Another former clerk recalled, “Marshall was no longer up to his responsibilities, or even the appearance of being up to them.’’ Read more

Supreme Court justice terms should end before age clouds reason