Proponents of Amendment 5 lean heavily on a particular comparison: Texas, Florida, and Pennsylvania have judicial retirement ages of 75; Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee have no cap at all. "We are an outlier," the argument goes. This paper situates the argument against the other comparison proponents omit: the comparative behavior of voters when asked whether to raise the age. Across ten state ballot measures since 2011, voters said yes once. They said no nine times. Louisiana said no twice.
Sixteen states, including Louisiana, currently set the judicial retirement age at 70 — the lowest among states that have any mandatory age. These include a mix of politically diverse states: Louisiana, Missouri (for state judges above the municipal level), and others. Eight states set the age at 75: Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Washington. Vermont sets it at 90, the highest (approved by voters in 2003). Nineteen states have no mandatory retirement age.
The distribution is not evidence of a right answer. It is evidence that different states have made different calls, reflecting different constitutional traditions and different political compromises. A state legislature that says "we are an outlier" is cherry-picking the comparison. The more honest version is: "we are in a large cluster of states that use 70 as the cap, along with Missouri; a smaller cluster uses 75; an even smaller group uses other ages; nineteen states have no cap." Each of those positions has defenders and each has critics. "Other states do it" is not an argument.
Since 2011, voters in ten states have decided on ten constitutional amendments addressing judicial retirement ages. The results are striking:
Voters approved only the Pennsylvania measure, and that by a razor-thin margin. Nine rejections, one narrow approval. That is not a distribution consistent with "voters who are informed about this issue want it to pass." It is a distribution consistent with "voters who are informed about this issue want the age to stay where it is."
New Hampshire's November 2024 election included a proposal identical in substance to Louisiana's Amendment 5: raise the judicial retirement age from 70 to 75. The amendment received 65.6% approval. It failed because New Hampshire's constitution requires two-thirds (66.67%) approval for constitutional amendments. The proposal fell about one percentage point short of the two-thirds threshold.
Translated to Louisiana's rules, 65.6% would be a comfortable pass (Louisiana requires a simple majority). The question for Louisiana voters is not whether Amendment 5 is currently expected to receive 65.6% — it is whether a proposal that failed in New Hampshire should be endorsed by Louisiana voters under a more permissive constitutional regime. The New Hampshire result is best read as evidence that even substantial majorities of informed voters are uncomfortable with this specific change. The fact that Louisiana's constitutional bar is lower is an argument for additional voter scrutiny, not less.
Pennsylvania in 2016 is the only state since 2011 where voters approved raising the judicial retirement age from 70 to 75. The margin was 51.1% to 48.9%. Three features of the Pennsylvania campaign are worth understanding in the Louisiana context.
First, Pennsylvania had unusually organized YES-side advocacy, funded in substantial part by the Pennsylvania Bar Association and by court-reform advocates who had been working on the issue for years. The YES campaign spent heavily on voter-information materials. The NO campaign was relatively under-resourced.
Second, the Pennsylvania amendment's ballot language was the subject of litigation. Voters in 2016 saw different ballot language than the language originally approved by the Legislature, because intervening litigation led to a revised ballot question. Post-election analysis suggested that some voters were confused about what they were voting for. This is not an argument that the 51% majority was illegitimate; it is an argument that the margin cannot be read as a clean voter endorsement of the substantive change.
Third, even in Pennsylvania, the approval margin was 51–49. More than 2 million Pennsylvania voters voted NO. The outcome was not a landslide. It was a squeaker. Louisiana's 2014 result, by contrast, was decisive in 62 of 64 parishes — the opposite kind of margin.
Proponents also note that several states have no mandatory judicial retirement age at all: Connecticut (for state senior justices), Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and the federal judiciary among others. These are real examples. They are not especially helpful to the YES-side case for two reasons.
First, most of those states are in the South and operate under very different judicial-selection systems than Louisiana. Georgia and Tennessee use commissions, partisan elections, and gubernatorial appointment in varied combinations. Mississippi uses partisan elections of limited duration. These systems produce judicial cohorts with different tenure patterns from Louisiana's, and they generate different criticisms. Reasoning by analogy to states with very different judicial-selection architectures is weak.
Second, the federal judiciary — where there is no retirement age and judges serve for life on good behavior — is currently the subject of extensive scholarly and public criticism precisely because of its lack of a retirement age. The federal courts are a cautionary example, not a validating one. Multiple states have considered and rejected moving toward the federal model.
The national comparative record on this question is unfavorable to Amendment 5. Voters in ten states since 2011 have been asked whether to raise judicial retirement ages. They said yes once, by a razor margin, in a confusing ballot-language context. They said no everywhere else — including in Louisiana, twice. The pattern is not random. It is a stable voter preference for orderly judicial turnover, expressed across red states and blue states, urban jurisdictions and rural jurisdictions. Louisiana voters in 1995 and 2014 were part of that national pattern. A 2026 vote against Amendment 5 continues it. The burden should be on proponents to explain why Louisiana voters' stated preference over thirty years should be overridden now.