https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/03/supreme-court-kennedy-legacy-kavanaugh-gorsuch/
Kennedy’s Supreme Court legacy is being erased, in part by past clerks
Retired justice Anthony M. Kennedy was in the front row of the Supreme Court’s marble-columned courtroom last fall when the justices reconsidered a question he had answered years ago: the reach of the Clean Water Act’s protections of the nation’s streams and wetlands.
Since 2006, industry challenges of Kennedy’s opinion, which expanded the government’s ability to set pollution regulations in environmentally sensitive areas, had consistently failed.
But it was a different Supreme Court that assembled last October. And when it handed down a decision six months later, the protections Kennedy had established were significantly stymied. Not a single justice — including two former Kennedy clerks nominated by President Donald Trump — endorsed the rules Kennedy had written 17 years earlier.
And so it goes across a wide swath of American law.
During his three decades on the court, Kennedy, nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1988, was almost sure to be found in the majorities that prevailed on the nation’s most monumental concerns. A center-right moderate who sometimes sided with the court’s liberals, he cast the vote that established a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry and determined how far government may intrude on the right to an abortion, and whether attempts to curtail the corrupting influence of campaign contributions violated free speech. Kennedy controlled when universities could take race into account to seek diverse student bodies, and how schools could sort pupils to ensure desegregation.
Other Kennedy votes shielded juveniles and the intellectually disabled from the death penalty, although he refused to find capital punishment unconstitutional. His mixed feelings on gun control were one reason the court hesitated to take such cases for more than a decade.
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