How long is judicial branch term

The Senate Judiciary Committee typically conducts confirmation hearings for each nominee. Article III of the Constitution states that these judicial officers are appointed for a life term. Courts play no role in the nomination and confirmation process.

Court of appeals and district court judgeships are created by legislation that must be enacted by Congress. The Judicial Conference through its Judicial Resources Committee surveys the judgeship needs of the courts every other year.

A threshold for the number of weighted filings per judgeship is the key factor in determining when an additional judgeship will be requested. Other factors may include geography, number of senior judges, and mix of cases. The Judicial Conference presents its judgeship recommendations to Congress. The Constitution sets forth no specific requirements. However, members of Congress, who typically recommend potential nominees, and the Department of Justice, which reviews nominees' qualifications, have developed their own informal criteria.

One is not nominated or appointed to the position of chief judge except for the Chief Justice of the United States ; they assume the position based on seniority. These selections are subject to Senate confirmation. The merit retention provision of Pennsylvania's constitution allows all but magisterial district judges to be retained with a simple "yes" or "no" vote without ballot reference to political affiliation. This provision was designed to remove judges from the pressures of the political arena once they begin their first term of office.

Magisterial district judges run in competitive elections. Mandatory retirement age for judges is 75 years, but retired judges may, if approved by the Supreme Court, continue to serve the Commonwealth as senior judges.

The Framers were prepared to have a country in which there was only one federal court: the Supreme Court. If that were the nation we lived in today, anyone who had a complaint about anything—about unlawful discrimination, or a violation of the right to free speech, or police brutality—would have to go to state court.

The state court judge might be appointed by a governor or even a mayor, or might be elected. That would all depend on state law. State law would decide what kind of jury, if any, that person would get.

You would, ultimately, have a chance to ask the U. Supreme Court to hear your case—but the Supreme Court is just one court and can only hear a relatively small number of cases each year. That is not the nation we live in today.

Now it is important not to underestimate how much state courts do, even today. Even today, when we have an extensive federal court system, state courts decide many more cases than federal courts, by far.

But while the rules that determine when you can get into federal court can be complicated and technical, federal courts are often available for people who think they have been deprived of their federal constitutional rights, and for people with other kinds of claims, too. At times in our history, federal courts have been havens for people who were victims of discrimination in the states where they lived.

At other times, federal courts have been accused of being in the pockets of lawyers for the wealthy and privileged. One other way in which the Framers of Article III did not foresee the future is, if anything, even more remarkable. To a degree, the Framers of the Constitution did know about that.

If you think about it, even an ordinary police officer acts a little like a judge: she will listen to your excuses and then decide whether to give you a ticket. There was no federal police force when the Constitution was adopted, but there were tax collectors, customs inspectors, and army paymasters, and they all had to make some decisions that were a little judge-like. What the Framers could not have foreseen was that some day there would be thousands of federal employees like that, hearing millions of cases, often in formal settings that resemble courtroom trials.

Important federal programs, like Social Security and Medicare, could not operate without employees like that. The practical accommodation our system has reached as we said in the joint statement is that these decisions can be appealed to federal judges who do have life tenure, and ultimately can even go to the Supreme Court.

But this hugely important part of the federal government reflects another of the many ways in which our Constitution is not just an unshakable foundation but a flexible institution that can adapt to the needs of a nation, and a world, that are in countless ways different from what the Framers knew.

Each year, the Supreme Court starts its new term on the first Monday of the month of October, an annual event that goes back to….