Court-hoarding: Another method of gaming judicial turnover

Abstract

While a slew of recent scholarship has examined the phenomenon of executive overstay, there is little talk about the more complex and equally vexing phenomena of judicial overstay. This article begins to examine the many layers and complexities of judicial overstay by exploring whether the political branches ever seek to prolong abusively the time in office of loyal judges, and if so, by what mechanisms. Illustrating this is not merely a theoretical practice, we label such a phenomenon court-hoarding, and consider it a subset of the broader category of judicial overstay. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we argue that while court-hoarding is a somewhat risky and less-known governance tactic that is likely to occur only when certain conditions are fulfilled, the potential benefits of court-hoarding for power consolidation and institutional monopoly power are profound. Second, we contribute to the emerging literature on judicial tenure. More specifically, we add conceptual utility to thinking about judicial tenure—and its abuse—by describing a three-layer model of court-hoarding, consisting of a core, a mid-layer, and a periphery, which correspond to three broad categories of influencing judicial tenure across time and space.