Over at the Legalities blog, Jan Crawford Greenburg has a very interesting post on Gonzales v. Carhart that begins:
It’s sometimes too easy to mock Anthony Kennedy, and people sure have done a lot of it over the years. He can seem infuriatingly unmoored. He agonizes over his decisions. He’s been known to change his mind in a case or two. And his writing style is about as grand as his ornately decorated chambers in the Court.
But in yesterday’s landmark abortion case, Kennedy was the Associate Justice he believes himself to be.
“If I say something,” Kennedy told me in the summer of 2006, “I want to stick with it.”
I’d asked Kennedy how he thought he and Sandra Day O’Connor were different. He seemed frustrated by her approach to the law, and he suggested she was simply more willing to walk away from positions she’d taken in previous cases.
“I think I may adhere somewhat more closely to whatever standard I come up with,” Kennedy said.
It seemed obvious during our talk that Kennedy had a case in mind: Stenberg v. Carhart, the Court’s decision in 2000 that struck down state laws banning partial birth abortion.