Plato and the American President: Thirty-five as the Age of Eligibility

Abstract

The thirty-five year minimum age requirement for U.S. presidents was set late in the Constitutional Convention. The reasons for that choice must be inferred because so little survives from the contemporary record. The only source attaching significance to thirty-five that the Founders had access to was Plato's Republic. The Founders did not want to be governed by Plato's guardians, but they did expect their presidents to possess some of the guardians' attributes. Simply put, however much they looked ahead to the future, they were still anchored to the past. It is difficult to say much more than that because so much of the Founders' intellectual world eludes us—a reminder, as Laurence Tribe put it, that there is more to the Constitution, and to the men who wrote it, than meets the eye.