Anthony Kennedy’s retirement: “A historic opportunity to reshape the court”

Anthony M. Kennedy announced yesterday that he is retiring from the United States Supreme Court, effective July 31. The Wall Street Journal called him “one of the Supreme Court’s most consequential modern-day justices and author of landmark rulings on gay rights, the death penalty and campaign finance.”

The Journal also noted the significance of Kennedy’s announcement: his decision “hand[ed] President Donald Trump a historic opportunity to reshape the court.”

A remarkable tenure

Anthony Kennedy was born and raised in Sacramento, California. He graduated from Stanford University in 1958 with a BA in political science after spending his senior year at the London School of Economics. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1961, then served a year in the California Army National Guard.

He and his wife, Mary, were married in 1963 and are the parents of two sons and a daughter.

President Reagan nominated him for the Supreme Court in 1987; he was confirmed by the US Senate on a 97-0 vote. He is one of five Catholic justices on the Supreme Court (there have been only thirteen such justices out of 113 in the Court’s history).

Justice Kennedy turns eighty-two on July 23. He is the fourteenth longest-serving justice in the Court’s history.

A divisive ruling

Anthony Kennedy is best known as the “swing vote” on many rulings across his tenure. One biography describes him as “a surprising and unpredictable justice on the Supreme Court, displaying thoughtful independence that at times, fails to reflect any particular ideology.”

Most significantly, he wrote the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark 2015 five-to-four ruling guaranteeing the right to same-sex marriage. His vote not only legalized gay marriage in this country–it also opened the way to the escalating conflict between religious freedom and sexual freedom we are witnessing today.

In his opinion, Justice Kennedy stated: “It must be emphasized that religions, and…