THE SWING VOTE
After serving as a professor at McGeorge School of Law of the University of the Pacific, Kennedy was appointed to the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1975. In 1988, Ronald Reagan nominated Kennedy for the Supreme Court, after his first two nominees failed to gain Senate approval.
In recent years, Kennedy has become the court’s swing vote, and determining the outcome in crucial 5-4 decisions has made him both an hero to some causes and a lightning rod for criticism.
Adamany cites two important cases in which Kennedy has served as the deciding vote on the Supreme Court decision.
In Lawrence v. Texas, Kennedy sided with the court’s liberals in striking down sodomy laws that particularly targeted homosexuals.
“He affirmed for the first time that gays and lesbians are part of the American community and should be treated with dignity,” Adamany says of the decision. “As he read the opinion there were muffled sounds in the courtroom—it was of gay and lesbian lawyers who had come to hear the decision, weeping.”
More often than not, however, Kennedy has sided with the more conservative side of the Court, as exhibited in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Elections Committee. The decision in that case struck down laws preventing corporations from spending corporate money on political campaigns.
Kennedy has accumulated criticisms for his decisions, notably from Jeffrey Rosen in The New Republic, who claims that Kennedy uses instinct in place of rigorous analysis.
But Jan C. Greenburg, author of a bestselling book on the Supreme Court, said that critiques of Kennedy are most often based off of his refusal to adhere strictly to conservative values and not a thorough legal analysis of his decisions.
Regardless of the varying evaluations of Kennedy’s legal career, O’Neil called him an “unsung hero,” emphasizing that he treasures his Harvard Law School connection. And for Kennedy, after all these years of being involved in the law, he still has a passion for it.
“I have great admiration for the system,” Kennedy said in a 2009 interview with C-SPAN. “The system works.”