The ballot question for Amendment 5 reads: "Do you support an amendment to change the mandatory retirement age for judges from seventy to seventy-five, provided that a judge may continue to serve to complete a term of office?" The clause after the comma — the term-completion clause — is the part of the amendment that receives the least public attention and that has the largest practical effect on how old a sitting Louisiana judge can be. This paper explains the mechanism, the math, and the drafting choices.
Louisiana elects its judges. Trial-court judges (district court) serve 6-year terms. Louisiana Courts of Appeal judges serve 10-year terms. Louisiana Supreme Court justices serve 10-year terms. A judge who is elected must stand for re-election at the end of their term if they wish to continue. The constitutional retirement age — currently 70, proposed to be 75 — operates alongside the term structure.
Under current law (the 2003 accommodation preserved in the existing Constitution), a judge who reaches 70 during a current term may complete that term before retiring. That is the narrow "complete a term" carve-out that Louisiana voters approved in 2003. Amendment 5 of 2026 preserves that carve-out but applies it to the new age of 75. A judge who reaches 75 during a current term may complete that term before retiring.
The math becomes dramatic at the appellate level. An appellate judge elected at age 74 to a 10-year term of office turns 75 in year one. The term ends in year ten. Under Amendment 5, the judge may complete the term. The judge leaves the bench at age 84.
The 84-year-old case is not hypothetical in a bad-faith sense. It is fully within the plain reading of the amendment's ballot language and within the plain operation of Louisiana's existing judicial-term structure. More common cases across a realistic distribution of judicial elections:
The age at which a judge actually leaves the bench under Amendment 5 depends on the arithmetic accident of when their election fell relative to their 75th birthday. A judge elected at 76 or older could not run under Amendment 5 (above the 75 cap at election). A judge elected at 75 exactly would serve until 81 or 85 depending on court level. A judge elected at 65 would serve until 71 or 75 depending on court level. The distribution across Louisiana's bench after several election cycles under Amendment 5 would include a meaningful number of judges serving into their late 70s and early 80s.
Proponents describe Amendment 5 as "raising the retirement age to 75." That framing is partially accurate — it does raise the cap for election eligibility — but it understates the real-world ceiling, because a judge elected at 74 does not have to step down at 75. The real-world ceiling is 75 plus whatever fraction of a term remains when the judge crosses 75. Proponents routinely describe the amendment without explaining the term-completion extension. Voters who read only the YES-side summary materials reasonably conclude that the new cap is 75. The actual new ceiling is closer to 84.
Drafters had alternatives. They could have written the amendment to require retirement at 75, with no term-completion clause, forcing mid-term vacancies where they arise. They chose not to. They could have written the amendment to cap the new age at 75 for election — meaning a judge must be under 75 at the time of election, producing a maximum departure age close to 81 (6-year term) or 85 (10-year term), but only for judges who were already sitting at the time of election. They chose the term-completion version instead. Each drafting choice moves the effective ceiling higher. The version that was chosen is the version with the highest ceiling.
Constitutional design is the art of setting rules that operate well across the full range of cases the rule will encounter. A retirement age of 70 with a term-completion clause for current terms (the current rule) produces a fairly tight distribution — most judges leave between 70 and 76, with the upper end reserved for those who happened to cross 70 at the beginning of a 10-year appellate term. A retirement age of 75 with a similar term-completion clause (Amendment 5) produces a much wider distribution, with judges leaving between 75 and 84.
The wider distribution matters for three reasons. First, the upper end of the distribution includes ages at which cognitive-performance statistics — averaged across large populations — show meaningful decline. Individual judges vary; distributions do not. A rule that permits systematic service into the early 80s accepts a distributional cost that a rule capped at 75 or 76 does not.
Second, the wider distribution is less predictable. Administrative planning — court calendar management, case assignment, judicial-retirement-system actuarial work — benefits from tighter distributions. Amendment 5 makes every future judicial retirement harder to forecast, because the effective leaving age varies by up to nine years based on election timing.
Third, the wider distribution increases the incumbency advantage. An appellate judge elected at 74 under Amendment 5 effectively receives a ten-year term with no re-election check — because the judge will be past the new 75 cap when the term ends and therefore cannot stand for re-election. That is a one-time seat purchase rather than an ongoing electoral accountability relationship. Multiplied across the bench, this creates a meaningful class of judges whose tenure is not subject to any further voter review.
Louisiana maintains a retirement system for state judges. The system is actuarially funded on assumptions about the distribution of judicial retirement ages. Amendment 5 shifts that distribution upward by five years at the low end and by up to nine years at the high end. Actuarial adjustments would follow. The state's judicial-retirement-system liabilities decrease somewhat because judges are paid salary longer before drawing retirement; but the post-retirement benefit years per judge also shift, and the population of actively-sitting older judges receives care-of-judge administrative-support resources that would otherwise go to replacement judges. These are not catastrophic fiscal effects. They are real effects that proponents have not quantified in any public document.
The term-completion clause is the part of Amendment 5 that most voters will not notice on the ballot and that will most affect how the amendment operates. It is what transforms a "retirement age of 75" into a practical ceiling closer to 84. Voters who want to retain the age-70 cap because they believe orderly turnover benefits the Louisiana bench should vote NO on Amendment 5 — because the alternative is not a simple five-year extension. The alternative is a distribution of judicial tenure that reaches, at its upper end, into the eighth decade of life for appellate judges whose final term happens to begin late in their career.