One thing is certain about the U.S. Supreme Court, which ended its term Monday.
Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, 72, a Ronald Reagan appointee who has served since 1988, remains the key to the court.
More often than not, Kennedy was the swing vote in 5-4 decisions, as he moved between the court’s conservative and liberal camps.
Anthony M. Kennedy
This made Kennedy “the most powerful jurist in America,” concluded Adam Liptak of The New York Times.
Liptak forms this opinion using numbers drawn from the “End of Term ‘Super Stat Pack’” posted on Scotusblog.com, a website founded by lawyer Thomas C. Goldstein.
The statistics show that Kennedy voted with the majority in 73 of the court’s 79 votes. That put him in the majority 92.4 percent of the time, the highest figure among the justices.
Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, a power on the conservative side, had the second highest percentage of majority votes cast, 83.5 percent.
Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, the most consistently liberal of the justices, had the lowest percentage of majority votes, 64.6 percent.
In emerging as the justice most likely to move between the liberal and the conservative camps, Kennedy takes over a role often filled by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor before her retirement in January 2006.
But this year, the centrist Kennedy moved to the right, perhaps influenced by the arguments of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, an emerging leader of the conservative wing of the court.
Liptak notes that in the 16 cases where the four conservative justices were on one side and the liberal justices on the other, Kennedy voted with the conservatives 11 times.
Though he generally voted with the conservatives, Kennedy may have pushed them somewhat toward the middle, as well.
Most recently, he was in the 5-4 majority that reversed a lower court decision and sided with 16 white and two Hispanic firefighters in their suit against the city of New Haven, Conn.
The firefighters had done well on a promotion exam that the city threw out because no African-American firefighters did well enough to be eligible for promotion.
In an analysis of the court’s recent term, Jess Bravin of The Wall Street Journal notes that the New Haven decision, which Kennedy wrote, reflects Kennedy’s moderating influence.
While the decision reverses the lower court, it doesn’t rule on the constitutionality of the laws in question. Indeed, in a separate concurring opinion, Scalia notes that the court put off decisions it will some day have to make.
The Supreme Court’s ruling overturned a decision by an appeals court panel that included Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s pick to replace retiring justice David Souter.
Sotomayor and her colleagues on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit can take some comfort in the fact that the Supreme Court reversed or vacated 59 of the 79 lower court decisions it ruled upon this term.
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