On June 27, Justice Anthony Kennedy announced he is retiring from the United States Supreme Court, providing President Donald Trump an opportunity to appoint his second judge to the top court. In 2016, Trump appointed originalist and pro-life judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Kennedy was appointed to the Court by Ronald Reagan in 1987 after the Senate rejected his original choice, Robert Bork.
Over the years, Kennedy has a mixed record on life issues, but he often sided with the Court’s liberals in cases upholding Roe v. Wade or expanding the rights of homosexuals. However, in the past year he ruled in favor of pro-life pregnancy centers’ free speech rights in California, and against attempts by Colorado officials to force Christian baker Jack Phillips to create a cake for a same-sex “wedding.”
Kennedy will be best known for the majority decision he wrote in Casey (1992), in which he espoused “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of life,” while preventing state restrictions on abortion. Taken with his other votes and written decisions (including upholding the federal partial-birth abortion ban in 2007’s Carhart decision), Kennedy appeared to support a view thatRoewas settled law but that some restrictions on abortion that were not unduly burdensome to women could stand constitutional muster.
The conventional wisdom on Justice Kennedy’s retirement is that President Trump’s appointee could be the deciding vote to overturn Roe v. Wadein the next few years. President Donald Trump was scheduled to announce his appointment, subject to Senate approval, on July 9. Three frontrunners emerged however: Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Raymond Kethledge. Coney Barrett and Kavanaugh oppose Roe, while Kethledge’s jurisprudence is murkier.
