After spending his senior year at the London School of Economics, Kennedy graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford in 1958 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science.

[8] On March 3, 1975, upon Reagan's recommendation,[4] President Gerald Ford nominated Kennedy to the seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that had been vacated by Charles Merton Merrill.

In July 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork to the Supreme Court seat vacated by Lewis F. Powell Jr., who had announced his retirement in late June.

"[18] Kennedy wrote an article the year before, however, about judicial restraint, and the following excerpt from it was read aloud by Jeffrey Levi, executive director of the National Gay & Lesbian Taskforce, at his confirmation hearing: One can conclude that certain essential, or fundamental, rights should exist in any just society.

[22] Absent from the vote were three Democrats: Paul Simon and Al Gore were campaigning and Joe Biden was ill.[27] Attorney General Edwin Meese presented Kennedy's commission to the court in a swearing-in ceremony on February 18, 1988.

Conservative pundit George Will and Georgetown University Law Center professor Randy Barnett have described Kennedy's jurisprudence as "libertarian",[30] although other legal scholars have disagreed.

[46] In 2005, the U.S. House Majority Leader at the time, Tom DeLay, criticized Kennedy for his reliance on international law and for conducting his own Internet research, calling him a judicial activist.

[46] A short 2008 law review article by retired lawyer Douglas M. Parker in The Green Bag[49] charged that much of the criticism of Kennedy was based upon "pop psychology" rather than careful analysis of his opinions.

"[50] According to The New Yorker staff writer Jeffrey Toobin, starting in 2003, Kennedy became a leading proponent of the use of foreign and international law as an aid to interpreting the United States Constitution.

[48] The use of foreign law in Supreme Court opinions dates back to at least 1829, though according to Toobin, its use in interpreting the Constitution on "basic questions of individual liberties" began only in the late 1990s.

[48] Defending his use of international law, in 2005 Kennedy told Toobin, "Why should world opinion care that the American Administration wants to bring freedom to oppressed peoples?

Kennedy co-authored the plurality opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which reaffirmed in principle (though without many details) the Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the right to abortion under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

[57] On May 30, 2006, Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in Garcetti v. Ceballos relating to whether the First Amendment protects statements by public officials pursuant to their duties from employer discipline.

[58] Kennedy utilized past precedents in Pickering v. Board of Education to determine whether or not an employee spoke as a citizen on a matter of public concern or in the capacity of his office.

[63] Additionally, Kennedy wrote that such a restriction failed to meet the standards of strict scrutiny, with the law acting to "[seek] to control and suppress all false statements on this one subject in almost limitless times and settings".

[67][68][69] The barring of a substantial amount of online expression was therefore unrelated to its stated goal and acted "to foreclose access to social media altogether [and] to prevent the user from engaging in the legitimate exercise of First Amendment rights".

Justice Ginsburg's dissent stated that such a reading of federal law "strains credulity" because it allows "[w]hole categories of regulated industries" to "gain immunity from a variety of pollution-control standards".

He also said that the reasoning behind Bowers was not widely accepted in American law (pointing, for example, to the Model Penal Code's recommendations starting in 1955) and that it had been rejected by most other developed Western countries (as in the Wolfenden Report of 1957 and a 1981 decision of the European Court of Human Rights in Case 7525/76, Dudgeon v United Kingdom).

As a result, Kennedy stated that there was a jurisprudential basis for thinking that "an integral part of human freedom" is allowing consenting adults to choose to privately engage in sexual activity.

[88] On issues of religion, Kennedy held to a less separationist reading of the Establishment Clause than did his colleague, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor,[citation needed] favoring a "Coercion Test" that he detailed in County of Allegheny v.

"[90] Justice Kennedy's majority opinion[91] in Citizens United found that the BCRA §203 prohibition of all independent expenditures by corporations and unions violated the First Amendment's protection of free speech.

"[92] Justice Kennedy's opinion for the majority also noted that because the First Amendment does not distinguish between media and other corporations, these restrictions would allow Congress to suppress political speech in newspapers, books, television, and blogs.

[93] The court overruled Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990), which had held that a state law that prohibited corporations from using treasury money to support or oppose candidates in elections did not violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

"[95] Kennedy also wrote in his opinion that he was not concerned if higher expenditures by people or corporations were viewed as leading to corruption, stating, "the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy.

He took a very broad view of constitutional protection for speech under the First Amendment,[citation needed] invalidating a congressional law prohibiting "virtual" child pornography in Ashcroft v. ACLU (2002).

[29] In the 2005 Gonzales v. Raich case, he joined the liberal members of the Court (along with conservative Justice Scalia) in permitting the federal government to prohibit the use of medical marijuana, even in states where it is legal.

[99] Several weeks later, in the controversial case of Kelo v. City of New London (2005), he joined the four more liberal justices in supporting the local government's power to take private property for economic development through the use of eminent domain.

[100] In Norfolk & Western Railway Co. v. Ayers (2003), Kennedy wrote a partial dissent in which he argued that railroad workers who had contracted asbestosis from their employment should not be entitled to recovery for the emotional pain and suffering from their increased risk of cancer.

[102] A December 2011 article in the Huffington Post noted that Kennedy in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts (2009) and Bullcoming v. New Mexico (2011) dissented on an interpretation of the Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses, where a lab tech who created a forensic report on a case is required to testify at trial if called.

[106][107][108] In January 2015, Kennedy recorded a short interview for Historic Mount Vernon about the vital role George Washington had played in the drafting and early interpretation of the Constitution.