As the Supreme Court ended its term in 2016, Justice Anthony Kennedy was the lightning that struck not once, but twice.
First he was the swing vote and writer of an opinion[1] that preserved the right of public universities to consider race as a factor in admissions. Then he was the deciding vote in a closely watched ruling that struck down Texas' strict regulations[2] of abortion providers.
Now that Kennedy has announced his retirement, conservatives hope President Donald Trump will soon reverse the legacy that upheld both abortion rights and affirmative action in a single week.
From same-sex marriage to capital punishment to free speech rights, Kennedy regularly sided with the court's liberal majority on social issues, defying expectations after President Ronald Reagan nominated him to the court in 1987.
He was hardly a liberal — the Sacramento-born Kennedy voted with Chief Justice William Rehnquist as often as any other jurist from 1992 to 2005, when Rehnquist died. But he sided with the court's liberal appointees at least once each Supreme Court term in nearly all of his 30 years on the bench.
"Conservatives were indeed often disappointed with Kennedy and his votes on a variety of issues, particularly social ones," Amy Howe, co-founder of the Scotusblog, said in a post Wednesday[3]. "One such topic was abortion."
In 1992, Kennedy wrote a joint opinion with Justices David Souter and Sandra Day O'Conner that upheld the "essential holding" of Roe v. Wade — the court's 1972 landmark abortion ruling — in a case that involved a challenge to Pennsylvania's abortion restrictions. "Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of
