Which Supreme Court justices will resign during Trump's term?

**Stage 1 — Blind analysis (ignore market prices):**

Clarence Thomas is 78 as of June 2026, has served on the Supreme Court since 1991, and remains actively participating in decisions. There are no credible reports, medical disclosures, or public signals suggesting an imminent resignation. Historically, Thomas has shown a pattern of long service and has not taken senior status; several long-serving conservative justices have remained on the bench into advanced age unless health problems or strong personal reasons intervened.

Factors pushing toward resignation within a four-year presidential term are relatively limited. A justice contemplating resignation usually does so for health/frailty, personal reasons, or strategic timing to secure an ideologically aligned successor. Under a Republican president, the strategic imperative for a conservative justice to step down is weaker in the sense that their successor is more likely to be of similar jurisprudential leanings — but the existence of a friendly president can also *encourage* a justice to retire to lock in a like-minded replacement. For Thomas specifically, public behavior and activity patterns to date show no consistent signals of imminent departure.

Statistically, on a multi-year horizon the probability of a voluntary resignation by a justice in their late 70s is materially above the probability for a justice in their 60s, but still well below 50% over a four-year window. Non-resignation outcomes include continued active service, abrupt death in office, or a late-life incapacity that leads to either informal withdrawal from full duties or a medical retirement. The event in question is explicitly *resignation during the term*; deaths or sudden incapacitation that do not include a formal resignation are not the same outcome and should not be conflated with a voluntary resignation.

Balancing these considerations — age-related increase in turnover risk against a long historical tenure, lack of disclosed health issues, absence of credible resignation signals, and political incentives under a Republican president — I place the independent (blind) probability of Thomas resigning during Trump's term at 22%. This reflects a non-negligible but below-even chance driven primarily by age/mortality and the possibility of sudden health or family developments.

**Stage 2 — Market calibration (compare to market prices):**

The current market prices are Yes: 0.37 / No: 0.63. My independent estimate (22%) is substantially lower than the market-implied 37% for Yes. Possible explanations for the market's higher price include:

- Heuristic-driven pricing based on age: many traders anchor on age alone and intuitively overweight the chance a justice leaves before 80, pushing prices higher than a fact-weighted model supports. - Conflation of resignation with death or incapacitation: some market participants may be pricing any form of vacancy as equivalent to resignation, which inflates the "Yes" side when the actual question requires a voluntary resignation. - Political speculation and narrative risk: because a resignation during a Republican term would be politically noteworthy, bettors who expect a conservative justice to time a retirement to coincide with a friendly president may overvalue that possibility. - Liquidity and trader composition: with ~74k contracts traded, price may reflect a cluster of motivated bettors or a few large trades rather than broad, information-efficient consensus.

Given these possible market biases, the market appears to be overstating the probability of a voluntary resignation by a non-trivial margin. If one believes the absence of public signals and Thomas's historical behavior are informative, the market price implies an exploitable edge; conversely, if one assigns higher weight to age and the elevated turnover risk for septuagenarian justices, the market price may look reasonable. On balance, I view the market as somewhat mispriced toward a higher resignation probability.

Overall assessment: independent probability 22% (Yes). Market at 37% suggests traders are overweighting age and political-timing narratives or conflating resignation with other causes of vacancy.