Lawrence v. Texas

About the Author

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy was born on July 23, 1936, in Sacramento, California. He attended Stanford University from 1954 to 1958, with a period of study at the London School of Economics. After receiving his BA from Stanford, he entered Harvard Law School, where he graduated with a bachelor of laws in 1961. Kennedy then entered the private practice of law, meanwhile coming to serve as a professor of constitutional law at the University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law. In 1975, President Gerald Ford nominated Kennedy to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, to which he was appointed. In 1988 President Ronald Reagan nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court, and he took office as an associate justice on February 18, 1988.

Considered a crucial “swing vote” on the Supreme Court, Justice Kennedy cast the decisive vote in decisions ranging from one that upheld the Republican congressional map in Texas to one invalidating planned military tribunals for suspected terrorists. Through the turn of the twenty-first century, his voting record was not predictably partisan; although he was appointed by a conservative Republican, he tended to vote with the liberal bloc of the Court almost as often as with the conservatives.