American jurist, appointed to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1988. He retired in 2018. Kennedy sat at the court's ideological centre and often supplied its crucial swing vote. He is one of the most consequential judges of modern times.
Kennedy wrote the landmark decision legalising gay marriage across America (Obergefell v. Hodges)—a ruling so eloquent that people stick quotes from it on their fridges.
In 1989 he defended the right to burn the American flag, writing: "The flag protects those who hold it in contempt."
Kennedy is scrupulous about judicial ethics: his wife turned down a job at the Department of Education in case one day he had to rule on a case involving it.
He argues passionately that prisons should be humane and try to rehabilitate inmates, citing Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn: "We can become better people by improving our prisons."
On free speech, he rejects both the left-wing argument that hateful statements should be banned and the right-wing argument that flag-burning is too offensive to allow. "If emotional harm to the listener is the measure by which we regulate speech, freedom of speech would mean only the freedom to say that which no one minds hearing."
In 2001 Kennedy visited Russia, where he met Vladimir Putin. Russian judges kept asking him how the White House "quietly communicated" its instructions to American judges—and could not believe there was no such mechanism. Kennedy formed the impression that Putin would be "fearless in imposing his own will, using the law only if convenient".
In 2025 he published "Life, Law & Liberty", a memoir in which he sounds deeply alarmed about the rule of law. His conclusion: "Our democracy cannot depend on one individual holding on to power longer than he or she should."
Hollywood is where if you don't have happiness you send out for it.