For more than a decade, he has been the fulcrum of the US Supreme Court, often casting a tie-breaking vote to end deadlocks between the court’s liberal and conservative justices.
Now Anthony Kennedy, who turns 82 next month, is stepping aside. “It has been the greatest honour and privilege to serve our nation in the federal judiciary for 43 years, 30 of those on the Supreme Court,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy has cast the deciding vote in a number of historic cases, including the high court’s groundbreaking decision legalising gay marriage in 2015, a five-to-four decision for which he wrote the opinion.
For years, he has infuriated conservatives with decisions striking down prayer at public school graduations and upholding abortion rights, and exasperated liberals with decisions on affirmative action and campaign finance laws. “Justice Kennedy has become probably the most powerful jurist in the entire world,” Mary Margaret Penrose, law professor at Texas A&M University, once told AFP. “Though he only has one vote, his vote literally changes most cases,” she said.
Kennedy has taken positions that demonstrate his “flexibility” in interpreting the Constitution, lawyer Lisa Linsky said. “His constitutional scholarship is rooted in common sense and the recognition that societies, attitudes and institutions change and evolve.” Born in Sacramento, California in July 1936, Kennedy, the second of three children, was steeped in the law from an early age.
His father was a lawyer and state lobbyist, while his mother worked as a secretary for the California State Senate, where Kennedy ran errands as a legislative page. Kennedy graduated from Stanford University after having spent his senior year at the London School of Economics. He earned his law degree from Harvard in 1961. He returned to California after his studies and took over his late father’s practice, deepening his political ties and honing his legal skills.
He became friends with another prominent California lawyer, Ed Meese, a Republican party grandee and an associate and future attorney general to then-governor Ronald Reagan. Reagan recommended Kennedy to then-president Gerald Ford who appointed him to fill a vacancy on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. And when he later became president, Reagan in 1987 named Kennedy to the US Supreme Court. — AFP
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