Noah Feldman, Columnist

Justice Kennedy’s Legacy Is the Dignity He Bestowed

His record was conservative at heart, even as he upheld abortion and gay rights.

June 27, 2018 at 3:24 PM EDT

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence.”
Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

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Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who announced his retirement Wednesday after more than 30 years on the bench, will go down in history as a study in internal contrasts.

Appointed by President Ronald Reagan, he wrote several important states-rights decisions over the years, and identified as a conservative — but was better known, and more celebrated, for his generation-defining liberal judgments on gay rights.

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