Justice Kennedy’s Retirement Could Reshape the Environment
The retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, announced Wednesday in a letter hand-delivered to President Trump, could bring about sweeping changes to U.S. environmental law, endangering the federal government’s authority to fight climate change and care for the natural world.
With Kennedy gone, a more conservative Supreme Court could overhaul key aspects of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, legal scholars say. And any new justice selected by President Trump would likely seek to weaken the Environmental Protection Agency, curtail its ability to fight global warming, and weaken its protections over wetlands.
The reason has to do with simple math. As on many other issues, Kennedy has functioned as the court’s swing vote on the environment, occasionally joining with the court’s four more liberal justices to preserve some aspect of green law.
“He’s been on the court just over 30 years, and he’s been in the majority in every single environmental case but one. You, a law professor at Harvard who has argued 14 cases in front of the Supreme Court.
