Anthony Kennedy

Anthony Kennedy served on the Supreme Court from 1988 to 2018 and for much of that time cast the deciding vote in its most closely divided cases. He was born on July 23, 1936, in Sacramento, California, where his father was a lawyer and lobbyist in the state capital, and as a boy he worked as a page in the California State Senate. He graduated from Stanford University in 1958, after spending a year at the London School of Economics, and earned his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1961. After his father's death he took over the family law and lobbying practice in Sacramento, and he taught constitutional law part-time at the McGeorge School of Law for more than two decades.

President Gerald Ford appointed Kennedy to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 1975. When Justice Lewis Powell retired in 1987, President Ronald Reagan's first nominee for the seat, Robert Bork, was rejected by the Senate after contentious hearings, and a second choice, Douglas Ginsburg, withdrew. Reagan then nominated Kennedy, who was viewed as a less polarizing conservative. The Senate confirmed him 97 to 0 on February 3, 1988, and he took his seat on February 18. After Sandra Day O'Connor retired in 2006, Kennedy was most often the justice in the middle, siding at times with the Court's conservative members and at times with its liberal ones.

Kennedy wrote the Court's major gay rights decisions: Romer v. Evans (1996), Lawrence v. Texas (2003), United States v. Windsor (2013), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which established a nationwide right to same-sex marriage. He was a co-author of the joint opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which reaffirmed the core of Roe v. Wade, and he wrote Citizens United v. FEC (2010), which held that independent political spending by corporations and unions is protected speech. He also wrote Roper v. Simmons (2005), barring the death penalty for crimes committed by minors, and Boumediene v. Bush (2008) on Guantanamo detainees. He retired on July 31, 2018, and was succeeded by his former clerk Brett Kavanaugh.