Supreme Court justices have a job for life. But some left the court to make their lasting mark

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the summer of 1941, James F. Byrnes became a Supreme Court justice. Little over a year later, he had had enough and left the court to take a key role in planning the nation’s wartime economy.

Americans have become accustomed in recent decades to justices who retire only after decades on the bench, or like Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia, who died while on the bench. Ginsburg and Scalia are among nearly half the 116 men and women who have been justices who died while still serving or within a few months of retirement.

Legislation pending in Congress would end life tenure on the Supreme Court, though there is little chance term limits will become law anytime soon even with the support of Vice President Kamala Harris, along with many others in her party and a majority of Americans. But those like Byrnes who did not regard the court as the pinnacle of their career and who left for other pursuits that would define their legacy suggest what justices might do if they couldn’t spend the rest of their lives on the nation’s highest court.

Byrnes, appointed to the court by President Franklin Roosevelt, later sat on a small secret committee of government officials that recommended the use of the atomic bomb against Japan and served as Secretary of State before ending his long public career as governor of South Carolina, where he emerged as a segregationist critic of the court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision that ended official segregation in public schools.

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