Illinois Law dean and professor Vikram David Amar, an expert in constitutional law, spoke with Illinois News Bureau business and law editor Phil Ciciora about Anthony Kennedy’s retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court. An excerpt from their conversation is below:

Justice Anthony Kennedy, the last Reagan appointee, was on the U.S. Supreme Court for more than 30 years. What is his legacy?

Supreme courts are named after chief justices – the Warren Court, for example – but usually a court’s fulcrum is someone else. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was Lewis Powell and Sandra Day O’Connor, respectively. But since O’Connor’s retirement in 2006, Kennedy has clearly been the court’s pivot point between its liberal and conservative elements. Powell and O’Connor were one kind of “middle” justice. They often “split the baby” by adopting a bottom-line position in between the liberal and conservative approaches on a given topic. Kennedy was different. On any particular area of law, he might join the conservatives or the liberals wholeheartedly, but he would swing, so to speak, from issue to issue.

Read the full article.