Anthony Kennedy

From Judgepedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Share this Judge:  E-mail this story Bookmark with Facebook Share on twitter.com Share on Google+

Anthony Kennedy
Current Court Information:
Supreme Court of the United States
Title:   Associate Justice
Service:
Appointed by:   Ronald Reagan
Approval vote:   97-0
Active:   2/17/1988-Current
Preceded by:   Lewis Powell
Past post:   Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
Past term:   1975-1988
Personal History
Born:   7/23/1936
Home State:   Sacramento, CA
Bachelors:   Standford University '58
Law School:   Harvard Law '61

Contents

Anthony McLeod Kennedy (born July 23, 1936) has been an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court since 1988. Appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan, he frequently is viewed as the Court's swing vote on social issues in some cases and has consequently held special prominence in some politically-charged 5–4 decisions.

Education

Justice Kennedy grew up in Sacramento, California as the son of a prominent attorney. As a boy he came into contact with prominent attorneys such as Earl Warren. He also served as a page in the California State Senate as a youngster. Kennedy graduated from C. K. McClatchy High School in 1954. He was an undergraduate student at Stanford University from 1954-58, graduating with a B.A. in Political Science, after spending his senior year at the London School of Economics.[1] He earned an Bachelor of Laws from Harvard Law School in 1961.

Legal career

Kennedy was engaged in the private practice of law in San Francisco, California, from 1961-1963, before taking over his father's practice in Sacramento from 1963-1975 following his father's death. From 1965 to 1988, he was a Professor of Constitutional Law at the McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific [2] and continues teaching law students (including legal seminars during McGeorge's European summer sessions in Salzburg, Austria). He remains Pacific McGeorge's longest-serving active faculty member. During Kennedy's time as a California legal professor and attorney, he assisted then-California Governor Ronald Reagan with drafting a state tax proposal.

Kennedy has served in numerous positions during his career, including the California Army National Guard in 1961 and the board of the Federal Judicial Center from 1987-1988. He also served on two committees of the Judicial Conference of the United States: the Advisory Panel on Financial Disclosure Reports and Judicial Activities (subsequently renamed the Advisory Committee on Codes of Conduct) from 1979-1987, and the Committee on Pacific Territories from 1979-1990, which he chaired from 1982-1990. He was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit by President Gerald Ford in 1975, upon the recommendation of Reagan.

Federal judicial career

Supreme Court appointment

Kennedy was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Reagan after Reagan's failed attempts at nominating both Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg.[3][4]

While vetting Kennedy for potential nomination, some of Reagan's Justice Department lawyers said Kennedy was too eager to inject the courts in disputes that many conservatives would rather leave to legislatures, and to identify rights not expressly written in the Constitution. Kennedy's stance favoring privacy rights drew criticism; Kennedy cited Roe v. Wade and other privacy right cases favorably, which one lawyer called "really very distressing."[5]

In another of his pre-SCOTUS opinions, Kennedy criticized (in dissent) the police for bribing a child into showing them where the child's mother hid her heroin; Kennedy wrote that "indifference to personal liberty is but the precursor of the state's hostility to it."[6] Reagan's lawyers also criticized Kennedy for citing an Amnesty International report to bolster his views in that case.

Kennedy endorsed Griswold as well as the right to privacy, calling it "a zone of liberty, a zone of protection, a line that's drawn where the individual can tell the Government, 'Beyond this line you may not go.'"[7] This gave Kennedy more bipartisan support than Bork and Ginsburg, and he was ultimately confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 97 to 0.

Ninth Circuit

Prior to his appointment to the Supreme Court, Kennedy served on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He was nominated to that position by Gerald Ford on March 3, 1975, and received his commission on March 24, 1975. His service on the Ninth Circuit lasted until February 17, 1988, when he was elevated to the Supreme Court of the United States. [8]

External links

References

  1. ↑ Justice Kennedy bio from Cornell
  2. ↑ Justice Kennedy bio
  3. ↑ Greenburg, Jan Crawford. Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court.2007. Penguin Books. Pages 53-60.
  4. ↑ New York Times
  5. ↑ Greenburg, Jan Crawford. Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court.2007. Penguin Books. Page 54.
  6. ↑ Greenburg, Jan Crawford. Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court.2007. Penguin Books. Page 55.
  7. ↑ Greenhouse, Linda. Becoming Justice Blackmun. Times Books. 2005. Page 189.
  8. ↑ Kennedy Biography from the Federal Judicial Center.

Portions of this article have been taken and edited from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Copyright Notice can be found here.

Federal judicial offices
Preceded by:
Charles Merton Merrill 		Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
1975–1988 		Succeeded by:
Pamela Ann Rymer
Preceded by:
Lewis Powell 		Supreme Court
1988–present 		Succeeded by:
NA
Retrieved from "http://judgepedia.org/index.php/Anthony_Kennedy"
Personal tools