The institutions will not renew themselves if no one ever leaves

Here is a statistic I cannot stop turning over. A survey of the treaty powers' high courts, circulated quietly through the Assembly of Signatories this past transfer season, finds that more than a third of sitting judges have now passed the age at which their own predecessors retired. On three benches it is more than half. The survey is careful and dull, the way good surveys are, and it describes without alarm a bench that is older on average than any in recorded practice, and showing no particular interest in changing that.

I spent years cutting into bodies that had waited too long for a part we could not yet grow. I know what a line looks like when nobody ever leaves it. The chart tells a different story now, but it's the same story wearing a new coat. We ended the organ waitlist. We did not end the waitlist for everything else.

Let me be clinical about it, since that is the one professional pleasure a doctor is allowed. The therapies from the Meridian Longevity Institute and its Earthside peers do not make anyone immortal. They slow the clock. But a clock slowed unevenly is just inequality with better branding, and access remains exactly as uneven as you'd expect of a scarce good priced by lottery and lobbying. The people most likely to receive the years are the people who already hold the offices. So the years flow toward the bench, the executive suite, the head of the household who was always going to outlast you and now, thanks to a monthly infusion, actually will.

The generation that was promised a turn

I have talked this season to clerks in their sixties who entered the law expecting a seat by now, and who speak of their principals the way medical residents once spoke of attendings who would not retire: with respect, and with a grief they're embarrassed to name. One of them, who asked me not to print her court, put it plainly. "I was trained to replace someone. Nobody told me the someone had decided not to be replaced."

This is not a complaint about longevity. I am glad we can slow aging; I would take the therapy myself and feel no shame about it (the shame belongs to the queue, not the cure). It is a complaint about tying the duration of public power to the duration of a private body, which we only ever did because bodies used to be reliably mortal. That was never a principle. It was an accident we mistook for one, and we have been dressing it up as wisdom ever since.

The repair is not complicated, which is why it will be resisted. Fix the term to the office, not to the officeholder. A seat on a high court exists to be filled and vacated on a schedule the public can see, whether the person in it lives thirty more years or three hundred. A judge who declined another century, as one did on this desk not long ago, should not have to be a saint to make room. The rule should make room. Let sainthood stay optional.

A body that never replaces its old cells gets cancer. I wrote that once and a reader accused me of being morbid. I was being a doctor. An institution that never replaces its leaders gets something similar, and we have not grown the therapy for it. The survey suggests we have about a generation to decide whether we want to.