The Last of the Small-Town Lawyers
Justice Anthony Kennedy, who announced his retirement from the Supreme Court on Wednesday, will almost certainly be the last justice to come from a legal world that has now all but vanished—the decorous, Atticus Finch-style 20th-century life of the small-town, general-practice lawyer, who saw life from many legal angles and formed a bulwark of American communities in all 50 states.
That background, over the years, produced some of the Court’s most distinguished figures, including Justice Robert H. Jackson, who left his imprint on many areas of the law. Lewis F. Powell, Jr., the last justice to come straight to the high bench from private practice, was in many ways a kindred spirit, the product of law practice in a state capital similar in size and atmosphere to Kennedy’s beloved Sacramento.
Kennedy’s departure, announced on Wednesday for July 31, definitively turns a number of pages in the Court’s history. All the remaining justices come not from the practicing bar but from the ranks of academia, issue advocacy, and (most importantly) service to the federal executive. The change in provenance has been accompanied by a rise in ideology and in the growing partisanship on the Court. That partisanship has been accelerated by the efforts of the Republican Party to annex the Court as an outpost of its partisan control.
Kennedy’s farewell will also be the farewell to even the pretense of dispassionate, nonpartisan jurisprudence. Beginning with the fight over his replacement, it will be war to the knife on and around the Court
