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In his new memoir, “Life, Law & Liberty” (to be published Tuesday by Simon & Schuster), former Justice Anthony Kennedy writes about his life’s journey to becoming a lawyer, a judge, and the deciding vote on some of the Supreme Court’s most consequential decisions.
Read an excerpt below, and don’t miss Erin Moriarty’s interview with Kennedy on “CBS Sunday Morning” October 12!
“Life, Law & Liberty” by Anthony Kennedy
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Prologue
Sacramento is where my thinking began about equality, liberty, and freedom. My wife, Mary, was also born and raised in Sacramento. We share cherished memories of younger years, school days, our wedding in 1963, and raising our three children in the city we loved. Sacramento is the place where we stood, in both the real and symbolic sense, to find beginnings and discover perspectives beyond. It is where my father practiced law, and where I — far too soon — stepped into his place to take over his practice. It is where my time on the bench began, and where so many of my beliefs about our country, about the rule of law, and about the world were formed.
The West, of course, was imperfect, and is imperfect. Neither the place nor the concept was anything close to idyllic. There were and are scorpions and snakes aplenty. On the frontier, just as in other places, racial, ideological, and gender prejudice were all too common and injurious. But perhaps more than elsewhere, the frontier contained the promise of something better, the promise of community, of tolerance, of growth and ambition, all tempered by the realms in which the reality fell short, many of which are discussed in the pages ahead. But it is in the West where I learned to see people as individuals, beyond their race or religion or gender, beyond whom they loved or how they chose to live their lives, beyond the elements that could have driven us apart. I began to try to understand the common beliefs that brought us together.
Only 116 men and women in our nation’s history have served as justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Growing up, it was easy to think of these justices as beyond reproach. And the inequity that they were all white men at the time was slow to dawn upon me. But my image was of nine sages behind closed doors, ruling on some of the most central, and potentially divisive, issues in society. And then, one day, after years spent practicing law, teaching, and then judging on the Ninth Circuit bench, suddenly one of the nine was me.
Reality set in: I hoped to still be the person I had always been. A husband, a father, a diligent reader. But still just a fallible person. For all my years on the bench — and it gives me pride to say that my service as a justice on the Court was the fifteenth longest in U.S. history — I took the responsibility seriously, as did each of my colleagues, no matter how much and how often we agreed or disagreed. In doing my best to interpret and apply the Constitution and the law to the cases that came before us, my hope was that my life in the West would help give me the perspective needed to be honest and fair.
Growing up in the West taught me, for example, that the creative energies of a great people cannot be realized unless the realms of economic freedom and personal liberty are respected. It reminded me that central to an individual’s claim to personal liberty is the right to fair treatment and to be protected from arbitrary government action. The West reminded me that the most successful businessperson and the lowest-paid worker are each entitled to this basic dignity, a dignity that helped Americans build the frontier and continues to help us today.
The West is so central to my self-understanding that it seems an appropriate place to begin. This Western boy did later go East. But my hope was to stay always close to those Western ideas of liberty and justice. This memoir is my way of putting those ideas on paper, of explaining how a Western boy became a lawyer, a judge, and a justice, seeking always to honor our country’s founding principles and to do so with civility, hard work, tolerance, and the ethical foundation our nation must preserve.
Excerpt from “Life, Law & Liberty” by Anthony Kennedy. Copyright © 2025 by Anthony Kennedy. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, N.Y.
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