Justice Anthony M. Kennedy
Today’s Justice of the Day is: ANTHONY M. KENNEDY. Justice Kennedy took the Judicial Oath to officially join the Supreme Court of the United States on this day, February 18, in 1988.
Justice Kennedy was born in 1936 in Sacramento, California. He graduated from Stanford Law School with a B.A. in 1958, and then from Harvard Law School with a J.D. in 1961.
During the year of his graduation from law school, Justice Kennedy entered private practice in San Francisco, California and served as a Private First Class in the California Army National Guard. He returned to his home town of Sacramento in 1963 to take over his father’s law practice after he unexpectedly passed away. In 1965 Justice Kennedy became a Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law (a position he would hold until the year before he joined the SCUS). He left private practice in 1975, after having accepted an appointment from President Gerald R. Ford to be a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where he would remain until his elevation to the SCUS.
Justice Kennedy was nominated by President Ronald Reagan on November 30, 1987, to a seat vacated by Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. He was confirmed (after President Reagan’s first two nominees to the seat had been defeated or forced to withdraw) by the United States Senate on February 3, 1988, and received his commission on February 11. Justice Kennedy has served on the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts, and is the third most senior Member of the SCUS. He is an actively serving Justice today.
Justice Kennedy is almost inarguably the most influential Member of the SCUS today, due in large part to the fact that the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (along with the appointment of the far more conservative Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. to replace her) has made it very difficult to form majorities in the most hotly-contested cases without his vote (he was actually in the majority in every single 5-to-4 decision for two of the roughly nine terms that have passed since Justice O’Connor left the bench). He is also widely regarded as the least conservative of the SCUS’s five currently-serving Republican-appointees, which many attribute to the fact that his version of judicial conservatism is tempered in many crucial respects by deep libertarian sympathies. Whereas the SCUS’s four other Republican-appointed Justices have been known to frequently abandon their perceived commitment to minimizing government intrusion into the lives of ordinary citizens, most notably in cases that revolve around women’s reproductive rights and LGBT issues, Justice Kennedy tends to be more than willingness to defy conservative orthodoxy if it violates his libertarian-leaning interpretation of the Constitution; cases that illustrate this tendency include Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which saw an unusual coalition of three Justices (specifically Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, and David Souter) craft an opinion of the Court which held that there does indeed exist a basic right to pursue an abortion, and United States v. Windsor (2013), wherein the majority opinion (authored by Justice Kennedy) found the infamous anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional on the grounds that it denies same-sex couples the equal liberty protected by the Fifth Amendment. However, to adequately understand Justice Kennedy’s judicial philosophy one must also avoid overstating the extent to which his occasional libertarian leanings lead him to side with the SCUS’s four Democratic-appointees. Indeed, many who try to explain why he decided to help write the joint dissent in The Affordable Care Act Cases (2012), rather than join the opinion of the Court authored by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. (which held that the Affordable Care Act was largely constitutional), attribute his decision to his unique vision of personal liberty. Furthermore, there are quite a few very hotly-contested legal controversies in which Justice Kennedy tends to follow a judicial ideology that is essentially indistinguishable from the more conservative Members of the SCUS, including in cases centering on race, such as Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), Shelby County v. Holder (2013), and Schuette v. BAMN (2014); so-called “religious liberty” issues, like Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) and Town of Greece v. Galloway (2014); and campaign finance, such as Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and McCutcheon v. FEC (2014).