98-Year-Old Federal Judge Asks Supreme Court to Restore Her Seat

Article III of the Constitution has historically been understood to mean that only Congress, through impeachment, can remove a federal judge. Neither that protection nor a lifetime appointment has helped Pauline Newman.

The 98-year-old federal appeals judge was suspended by her colleagues on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit three years ago, blocked from taking on new cases indefinitely. At the instigation of Chief Judge Kimberly Moore, the Judicial Council of the Federal Circuit effectively removed Newman from the bench, stopping her from hiring law clerks and taking her off the distribution list for proposed opinions, her lawyers contend. No criminal conviction triggered the action. No act of Congress authorized it.

On March 12, Newman's legal team at the New Civil Liberties Alliance filed a petition for a writ of certiorari, asking the Supreme Court to hear Newman v. Moore, calling it a landmark battle over judicial independence. The two questions at the center of the case are narrow but consequential: Can a federal court review a judicial council's decision to suspend a sitting judge? And can a judge sue to stop a judicial council from taking future unlawful actions? Newman's lawyers warn that without a clear answer, any judicial council can permanently bench a lifetime appointee with no outside review.

The petition's case rests partly on fitness evidence that Newman's lawyers say has never been rebutted. "Judge Newman has continued to speak and write before the legal community, and no finding of disability has been made concerning her in the years since the unlawful administrative orders began. She voluntarily underwent and passed three expert evaluations of her mental fitness and was reported as having the mental ability of someone decades younger," the petition states.

The petition also charges the proceedings with a fundamental structural flaw. The same judges who filed complaints against Newman served as her investigators and adjudicators, and requests to transfer the matter to another circuit for a neutral review were refused. "The length of the suspension, the apparent intention to keep her off the bench permanently, the same judges acting as complainant, witnesses and judges, and the refusal to transfer the matter to another circuit for neutral investigation are unprecedented," the petition argues.

The D.C. Circuit dismissed Newman's earlier lawsuit in August 2025 but acknowledged that she had raised serious questions about whether her ongoing suspension "comports with the structure of our Constitution." That concession, offered in a ruling against her, now forms the basis of the Supreme Court appeal.

Newman's case exposes a structural gap with no parallel in the other branches of government. Members of Congress face voters every two or six years. Presidents are subject to term limits. Federal judges face neither, and there is no mandatory retirement age, a contrast that has sharpened as aging leadership has become a national political question. Retired federal judge Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, has noted that mandatory age limits for judges "exist everywhere else in the world and in the majority of states" and that the Supreme Court's lack of an age limit or term limit is "really unusual."

Newman is the longest-serving active federal judge in the country, a distinction that now carries an asterisk. Her attorney, Mark Chenoweth of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, has framed the case as a direct threat to judicial independence, arguing that a judicial council willing to sideline one judge indefinitely leaves every other federal judge's lifetime appointment as durable only as the goodwill of colleagues. The Supreme Court has not yet indicated whether it will take the case.