Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point

by Steven Levitsky

Similarly, Australia established a retirement age of seventy for High Court justices in 1977, after the forty-six-year tenure of Justice Edward McTiernan came to an inglorious end. McTiernan had been appointed to the court in 1930, and by the 1970s the octogenarian’s voice was often “difficult for counsel to understand.” In 1976, McTiernan broke his hip swatting a cricket with a rolled-up newspaper at the Windsor Hotel in Melbourne. In an apparent effort to nudge him into retirement, the chief justice refused to build a wheelchair ramp in the High Court building, citing costs. McTiernan retired, and when Parliament took up the issue of establishing a retirement age, opposition was “virtually non-existent.”

great story