"Life tenure" is useful shorthand, but it does not mean that a judge must remain in active service forever or cannot be removed for impeachable misconduct. Judges may resign or retire. Eligible lower-court judges may take senior status, leave a regular active-service seat vacant for a successor, and continue performing judicial work. A judge may also be removed through impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate. Tenure therefore protects against ordinary political dismissal, not the Constitution's removal process.

Compensation protection closes another route to retaliation. Formal tenure would offer little security if elected officials could punish a particular judge by cutting the judge's salary after an unpopular decision. Article III prevents diminution of compensation during the judge's continuance in office. Congress still sets judicial salaries and funds the courts prospectively, but it may not use a pay cut to pressure a sitting Article III judge.

These rules attach to the office, not to every person who performs adjudicative work for the federal government. Bankruptcy judges, many Article I judges, and some territorial judges serve under statutory terms and protections. When an exam question invokes service during good behavior and protection against reduced compensation, it is identifying an Article III judgeship.

Worked application. A president demands that a district judge be fired after an injunction. Disagreement with the decision does not end the judge's tenure. The government can appeal through the judicial process; removal requires the separate impeachment-and-conviction route. If the same question instead describes a fixed-term territorial judge, the governing statute and court type must be examined before assuming Article III protection.

Tenure and compensation are structural devices. They help produce the broader condition called judicial independence, but they do not by themselves describe every limit, accountability mechanism, or relationship between courts and the elected branches. The next lesson develops that broader idea.

Video lesson: Structure of the Court System: Crash Course Government and Politics #19