Courts are one of the last places in modern society where a single person’s cognitive capacity carries absolute, largely unreviewed power.
With the wrap of a gavel or the flick of a pen, a judge can deprive someone of liberty, custody, housing, or due process with a signature. We screen airline pilots, surgeons, commercial drivers, and even school bus drivers for cognitive and physical fitness. Judges, by contrast, are trusted to self-report decline or quietly step aside when it becomes too obvious to hide.
- Most people never reached old age because of childhood death, infection, and injury.
- Those who did reach old age usually died in their 60s to 70s, not their 90s.
- Neurodegenerative disease was less visible because far fewer people lived long enough to develop it.
The framers were not imagining judges serving into their late 80s and 90s with slow cognitive decline. They were imagining a system where lifetime service probably meant 15 to 25 years on the bench after appointment, not 40 or 50.
Today, a federal judge appointed at 50 can easily serve until 90…98 if you’re Pauline Newman. That is a 40-year tenure plus in a biological environment the Constitution was never built to handle.
The Framers’ promise of a “lifetime” appointment made sense when lifespans were shorter and neurodegenerative disease was rare. It does not work in a world where people routinely live into their eighties and nineties, and where Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson’s disease, traumatic brain injury, and medication-induced cognitive impairment are no longer outliers. The judiciary has no systematic way to distinguish healthy aging from dangerous impairment. It relies on rumor, crisis, and institutional denial.
When this fails, the damage does not look dramatic. It looks procedural. It looks like missed deadlines, confused hearings, erratic rulings, and families quietly losing their cases without knowing why.
This is not hypothetical. It has already happened.
When Cognitive Decline Reaches the Bench
Judge ShawnDya Simpson, New York State Supreme Court
Simpson became the subject of complaints for erratic behavior, chronic lateness, and an inability to manage courtroom proceedings. A judicial conduct commission investigated and ordered a neuropsychological evaluation. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
Only after that process did she retire. And by then, she had already inflicted significant emotional harm on defendants. The retirement was technically voluntary, but it happened because oversight intervened. There was no routine screening that could have caught the decline earlier.
Judge Karen J. Williams, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
Williams was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s while serving on the federal bench. Federal judges have lifetime tenure and no mandatory health screening. She chose to assume senior status due to disability so she could step down while she still had clarity and dignity.
The system did not require this. It depended on her personal ethics.
Justice Rolf Larsen, Pennsylvania Supreme Court
Late in his career, Larsen’s behavior raised serious concerns among fellow justices about his mental fitness. Two colleagues openly discussed removing him for mental disability.
There was no medical process to assess him. The court resorted to impeachment, a blunt political instrument, because no clinical one existed.
Judge Pauline Newman, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
Newman, now in her late nineties, was suspended by her own court after refusing to cooperate with a fitness investigation amid concerns about her cognitive and physical capacity. She sued her colleagues. Her suspension has been extended repeatedly while litigation drags on.
This is what happens when a system built on assumption collides with biological reality.
Judge Kirsten Nielsen Hartig, Michigan
Michigan recently lived its own version of this failure. Judge Hartig was found unfit to practice due to dementia and neurocognitive disorder after issuing rulings while impaired. There was no screening system to detect the decline before harm occurred.
Families learned what was happening only after the damage was already done.
The Pattern Is Always the Same
No screening.
Whispers behind closed doors.
Harm to litigants and their families.
Then a public crisis.
Then improvised damage control.
That is not governance. It is luck.
Why Age Alone Is the Wrong Metric
Age does not cause cognitive impairment. But age increases exposure to things that do.
The Michigan analysis that led me to write the Fit-Bench proposal did not ask how many judges have dementia, because that question is really too narrow. It asked how many judges fall into any category that medicine already knows can degrade executive function in a safety-sensitive role.
Those categories were:
- measurable cognitive impairment
- early neurodegenerative disease
- history of traumatic brain injury
- medications that affect cognition
None of these are rare. None require a dementia diagnosis. Any one of them can interfere with judgment, impulse control, working memory, or emotional regulation.
When those four domains were applied to Michigan’s 591 judges, even conservative assumptions showed that well over half fell into at least one category that could impair judicial performance. Not because judges are reckless, but because human bodies age, get injured, and require medication, and the courts have no way to account for that reality.
Michigan is not an outlier. It is a sample.
What the National Math Looks Like
The United States has roughly 31,000 judges across federal and state courts.
Applying the same conservative risk-stacking model used in Michigan:
- 30 percent affected → 9,300 judges
- 40 percent affected → 12,400 judges
- 50 percent affected → 15,500 judges
That means one in three to one in two judges nationwide may currently be operating with some level of cognitive, neurological, or pharmacological impairment that could affect their decisions.
This is why Pauline Newman is not an edge case. She is what happens when a system carrying that much hidden risk finally hits a visible failure.
International Approaches: How Other Democracies Prevent This
Outside the United States, most judicial systems do not leave this to chance.
- In Canada, federally appointed judges must retire at 75.
- In the United Kingdom, judges now retire by 75.
- In Australia, Brazil, and Germany, high-court judges retire between 68 and 75.
- In India and Singapore, supreme court judges retire around 65.
Across much of the democratic world, judges serve fixed terms or mandatory retirement ages, not lifetime appointments. These systems do not pretend human cognition is infinite. They design institutions that can survive human biology.
Mandatory retirement ages are not at all perfect measures of fitness; they are just one variable. Some people remain sharp past seventy. Some decline earlier. But these systems avoid the worst failure: waiting until impairment becomes visible, political, and destructive before acting.
That is the failure the United States keeps repeating.
What the Fit-Bench Act Actually Does
The Fit-Bench Act does not punish judges. It does not presume incapacity. It does not undermine independence.
It introduces something every safety-sensitive profession already uses: measured cognitive fitness.
Fit-Bench would require periodic, evidence-based cognitive screening for judges above a defined age threshold, with medical standards and due process protections. It would allow capable judges to keep serving. It would identify impairment early, quietly, and humanely. It would protect litigants before harm occurs.
It prevents another Simpson.
Another Williams.
Another Larsen.
Another Newman.
Another Hartig.
This is not radical.
It is what responsible systems do when the math stops being theoretical.
