Event Recap: How Old Is Too Old to Govern?

“People around the world are living longer, including our elected officials and judges,” remarked Petrie-Flom Center Executive Director Susannah Baruch as she opened the Center’s recent event, “How Old Is Too Old to Govern?”

It’s a simple observation, but one that has become increasingly difficult for modern democracies to navigate. As careers stretch longer than ever, what happens when the people charged with leading, legislating, or judging continue to do so into advanced age? And how should the law respond when aging intersects with cognition, accountability, and legitimacy?

These questions animated a lively discussion among three panelists: Francis Shen, a law professor who studies the intersection of neuroscience and the law; Dr. Benjamin C. Silverman, a psychiatrist and bioethicist; and the Hon. Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge and senior lecturer at Harvard Law School. Together, they explored the legal, scientific, and ethical challenges of determining whether, and how, society should set limits on leadership longevity.

Rethinking the Relationship Between Aging and Governance

For Shen, the central tension is that, while neuroscience offers tools to understand aging and cognition, the question of when someone is “too old to govern” can never be reduced to biology alone. 

Leaders are serving longer than ever, yet the law and political systems have not evolved alongside what science tells us about aging brains. To grapple with that gap, Shen outlined three possible approaches, each with promise and peril: age limits, cognitive testing, and mandatory disclosure.

Age limits, he explained, have the appeal of simplicity. “All you need is a birth certificate and a calculator.” They’re already in place in many state court systems and in professions such as aviation. But their bluntness is also their flaw. Bright-line rules disregard the vast diversity in how people age, sidelining capable and experienced leaders simply because of an arbitrary cutoff.

Cognitive testing requirements, by contrast, would be more individualized, measuring actual function rather than assuming decline from age. Yet they raise steep constitutional and ethical hurdles. “You’d have to revise portions of the Constitution,” Shen said, and even then, testing would be fraught with scientific uncertainty and potential bias.

The third approach, and the one Shen finds most promising, is mandatory disclosure. Rather than dictating who can serve, this model focuses on transparency: allowing candidates to voluntarily share results of cognitive assessments, much like financial disclosures, so voters can make informed judgments. “This isn’t about disqualifying anyone,” Shen emphasized. “It’s about giving voters more information.”

What Science Can (and Can’t) Tell Us

From the scientific side, Dr. Benjamin Silverman explained that normal aging often brings slower recall or processing, but not necessarily impairment. “There’s not one process, not one disease, and enormous individual variation,” he said. Many public officials possess what neuroscientists call high cognitive reserve, the brain’s ability to compensate for decline by recruiting other neural pathways, making age-related impairment harder to detect.

But even sophisticated testing comes with caveats. Without prior baseline data, a cognitive assessment may reveal very little. A person whose lifelong IQ was 160 could score 110 on a test and still appear “average.” 

Silverman also explored the ethical challenges of assessing public figures at all. The Goldwater Rule, which prohibits psychiatrists from diagnosing individuals they haven’t personally examined, limits how much professional insight can inform public debate. Yet, he noted, complete silence from experts may not serve democracy either. “If expertise can help the greater good, should it be withheld entirely?”

While some researchers are experimenting with AI tools that analyze speech patterns to infer cognitive health, Silverman warned against overconfidence. Fatigue, medication, teleprompters, and even deepfakes can distort results. Ultimately, he suggested, voluntary and periodic cognitive assessments could be valuable, but they would need to be tracked over time and interpreted with caution. Science, he concluded, can illuminate part of the picture, but it cannot decide who is fit to lead.

Law, Legitimacy, and Renewal

For Judge Gertner, who retired from the federal bench at 65, the issue was as much about legitimacy as neuroscience. “I didn’t want to leave feet-first,” she said, “but I also felt young and wanted to do other things.” Gertner drew a key distinction between the question of impairment and the question of renewal: even a mentally sharp judiciary can lose legitimacy if it never changes.

She acknowledged that categorical limits, like mandatory retirement ages, are both over- and under-inclusive. They may prematurely force out brilliant judges while failing to catch younger ones in decline. On the other hand, individualized testing invites its own controversies: “We don’t even agree on what cognitive decline means,” she noted, and traditional tests may not capture skills like technological fluency that are increasingly vital for modern judging.

She added that even sophisticated assessments might miss what matters most in leadership: judgment. “Judging is more than just, can I add up a column of figures?” she said. “It has to do with experience, this je ne sais quoi of judgment.” That, she argued, cannot be captured by any cognitive test. Gertner reflected on her own years on the bench, noting that the experience she drew from would have remained valuable even decades later. “Even if my arithmetic abilities lapsed,” she said, “that doesn’t mean I couldn’t tell what a credible witness is.”

Still, Gertner leaned toward the need for some form of turnover, particularly for lifetime judicial appointments. Whether through retirement ages or term limits, she argued, democratic legitimacy requires periodic renewal. For elected officials, though, she viewed the problem differently: “Elections are themselves the mechanism of accountability. Voters already have the power to decide.”

An Unfinished Debate

The conversation ended much as it began: with no easy answers, but sharper questions. As Shen said, “We’re hiring people for how they process information, make judgments, and lead.” But the panel made one thing clear: As lifespans lengthen and leaders grow older, confronting these questions will only become more urgent.

Click here to watch video of the event.