That’s Ann Althouse’s question. (The actual measure on the ballot would have increased the retirement age for New York judges from 70 to 80, which does not go as far as the federally enacted mandate applicable to private-sector employers, which forbids the prescription of automatic retirement at any age at all.)
The state’s chief judge, Jonathan Lippman, calls the old age limit “outdated,” and Althouse replies:
What is outdated about thinking that older persons hang onto their jobs too long and fail to open positions to younger persons with new perspectives and experience with life as it is lived today? What is outdated about thinking that judges, cloistered and cosseted by the respect their office commands, lack accurate feedback about how well they are really doing? What is outdated about thinking that the judges, with their sharp and hardworking ghostwriters (AKA “clerks”), are unusually shielded from having their failing competence exposed?
I would add that while many advocates of modern employment law insist that we regard “age discrimination” as if it were somehow a phenomenon parallel to prejudice on the basis of race or ethnicity, and odious for the same reasons if not to as high a degree, I see little evidence that the general public has been sold on that proposition.