(A beautifully packaged gift edition of Obergefell et al. ...)
A beautifully packaged gift edition of Obergefell et al. v. Hodges, Justice Anthony Kennedys landmark Supreme Court decision on marriage equality A milestone in the history of American civil and human rights, Obergefell et al. v. Hodges legalized gay marriage across the United States. A powerful testament to the progress of human and civil rights, The U.S. Supreme Court Decision on Marriage Equality is an essential document of our times.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1612195326/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0937299227/?tag=2022091-20
Kennedy was born and raised in an Irish Catholic family in Sacramento, California. He was the son of Anthony J. Kennedy, an attorney with a reputation for influence in the California legislature, and Gladys, who participated in many local civic activities. As a boy, Kennedy came into contact with prominent politicians of the day, such as California Governor and later U. S. Chief Justice Earl Warren.
After high school in Sacramento, Kennedy attended Stanford University, where he received his A.B. in 1958, Phi Beta Kappa. In the course of his undergraduate career, Kennedy attended the London School of Economics from 1957 to 1958. After graduating from Stanford, Kennedy proceeded to Harvard Law School, where he received his J.D. in 1961 cum laude.
After being admitted to the California bar that in 1961, Anthony Kennedy began his legal career as an associate with the San Francisco law firm of Thelen, Martin, Johnson, and Bridges, though he took time off from his practice briefly in 1961 to serve as a private, first class, in the National Guard. In 1963 two important events occurred in Kennedy’s life. First, his father died unexpectedly, causing Kennedy to return to Sacramento to take over his father’s law practice.
With the client base inherited from his father’s practice, Kennedy developed a thriving practice in Sacramento. He also taught a constitutional law course at McGcorge School of Law of the University of the Pacific on a parttime basis beginning in 1965. Like his father, Kennedy combined the practice of law with lobbying activities for clients, and he soon established important California political contacts. Not the least of these was the friendship he formed with Ed Meese, who would soon play an important part in the administration of California governor Ronald Reagan and would eventually serve as President Reagan’s attorney general. In 1973 Kennedy helped draft an ad campaign for the passage of California Proposition One, a ballot initiative designed to limit government spending. Although the initiative failed, Reagan rewarded Kennedy by recommending him for appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
When Kennedy joined tire Ninth Circuit in 1975, he was the youngest judge then serving on the federal bench. He was Republican, conservative, and Roman Catholic on a predominantly liberal court of appeals. But even when Kennedy found himself a frequent dissenter on the court of appeals, he earned a reputation for solid judicial craftsmanship and a conservativism more modest than strident. When Justice Lewis Powell retired in 1987, Kennedy’s 12 years of solid service on the Ninth Circuit and his previous relationship with Reagan placed him on the list of possible nominees to replace Powell. Reagan, though, seems to have aspired to appoint someone more aggressively conservative than Kennedy.
The Senate eventually rejected the nomination by a vote of 58-42 on October 23, 1987. Reagan followed this defeat a week later by nominating Douglas H. Ginsburg, a 41- year-old former Harvard Law School professor who had worked in the Reagan administration and whom Reagan had appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1986. Accused of being a Bork clone, Ginsburg’s nomination attracted swift opposition and ultimately floundered on the revelation that he had smoked marijuana as a college student and a law professor. On November 7, 1987, nine days after the announcement of his nomination to the Court, Ginsburg asked President Reagan to withdraw his nomination. Kennedy, Reagan’s third choice, had now moved to the top. And although his nomination attracted token opposition, the Senate finally settled on an appointment that did not entirely please either its conservatives or its liberals but seemed like the best that either ideological camp could expect. The Senate unanimously confirmed Kennedy on February 3, 1988, and he took the oath of office as a Supreme Court justice on February 18,1988.
Kennedy became the most senior Associate Justice on the court following the death of Antonin Scalia in February 2016. Since the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor in 2006, he has been the swing vote on many of the Court's 5–4 decisions. He has authored the majority opinion in many of these cases, including Boumediene v. Bush and Citizens United v. FEC. Kennedy wrote in part the per curiam majority opinions in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Bush v. Gore. He is also notable for his majority opinions in each of the Court's landmark gay rights cases: Romer v. Evans, Lawrence v. Texas, United States v. Windsor, and Obergefell v. Hodges.
(A beautifully packaged gift edition of Obergefell et al. ...)
Kennedy is one of thirteen Catholic justices – of whom five sit on the Court as of 2017 – out of 112 justices in total in the history of the Supreme Court.
Soon after he took his seat on the Court, Kennedy demonstrated a willingness to chart a judicial path separate from his more conservative colleagues, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. A little more than a year after his appointment, Kennedy parted ranks with Rehnquist by voting with a majority of the Court in Texas v. Johnson (1989) to strike down a state law that prohibited flag burning. But his real declaration of independence from the conservative hard-liners on tire Court came in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), where Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, David H. Souter, and Anthony Kennedy co-authored the controlling opinion. Taking a centrist position on the long-controversial right to an abortion, first established in Roe v. Wade (1973), the opinion of Kennedy and his two other colleagues refused to overrule Roe but nevertheless reffamed the structure of the right to abortion to allow states more power to regulate abortions.
In the years since Kennedy placed himself securely in dte Court’s center, he has remained in that position, sometimes siding with more liberal justices on particular questions, sometimes supplying the swing vote need by Chief
Justice Rehnquist to achieve conservative results. Kennedy has tended to join the Court’s liberals on social questions such as die rights of women and gays and on the constitutionality of public religious exercises. Thus, he wrote the Court’s opinion in Romer v. Evans (1996), which declared unconstitutional a Colorado constitutional amendment tiiat prohibited state and local laws from protecting gays from discrimination. He also authored the majority opinion in Lee v. Weisman (1992), which held that graduation prayers offered by a Jewish rabbi at a middle school ceremony violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause.
On other issues, though, Justice Kennedy has supported important conservative decisions. He has, for example, sided with an emerging majority on the Court to cast increasing constitutional questions on affirmative action programs. In two decisions decided in 1989 and 1995, Kennedy joined a majority of the Court in questioning the constitutionality of minority set-aside programs that allocated a particular portion of public works contracts for minority owned businesses. Richmond v. J. A. Croson Company (1989) and Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena (1995) made it more difficult for both states and the federal government to award preferential treatment to minority groups on account of their race. Kennedy has also participated in the Rehnquist court’s decisions raising new questions concerning the reach of Congress’s power under the Constitution to regulate interstate commerce. From 1937 until the last decade of the 20th century, the Court had permitted Congress to regulate virtually any social or economic problem, using its commerce power. But in United States v. Lopez (1995) and United States v. Morrison (2000), the Court dealt constitutional rebukes to Congress, finding that attempts to regulate the possession of guns near school in Lopez and to make domestic violence a federal crime in Morrison exceeded its commerce power. These cases have reallocated the relative balance of legislative power between states and the federal government, and Kennedy has been a key ally of the Court’s more conservative wing in bringing about significant constitutional change in this area. In this he joins regularly with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, another of the Court’s moderately conservative swing votes.
The decade of the 1980s saw concentrated conservative efforts to place justices on the Supreme Court who would overturn the Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), which had recognized a constitutional right to an abortion. The fierce political contests over the failed nominations of Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg partially reflected the widespread belief that the justice who replaced Lewis Powell, himself one of the swing votes on the Court, might well play a key role in the future of the abortion debate. On this controversial subject, Justice Anthony Kennedy proved to be a bitter disappointment to conservatives when, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), he joined in the decision that reaffirmed the abortion right originally announced in Roe. But against this defeat, conservatives have been heartened by the Rehnquist court on other points, such as its disapproval of affirmative action programs and its reassertion of the prerogatives of states in the federal scheme of government. In these areas, Kennedy has been a predictable ally of Chief Justice Rehnquist. All in all, Kennedy remains where he began, a moderately conservative centrist on a Court generally characterized by its conservativism.
Anthony McLeod Kennedy is married to Mary Davis. The couple eventually had three children: Justin, Gregory, and Kristin.
