Anthony Kennedy retiring from Supreme Court

Nominated by President Ronald Reagan and sworn in in 1988, Kennedy became a swing vote on the nine-member court. He often sided with his liberal colleagues, including in the landmark ruling that recognized same-sex marriage in 2015.

“No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family,” he wrote in the majority opinion. “As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”

He also sided with the liberals and Chief Justice John Roberts in the 2010 landmark ruling on the Affordable Care Act. The 6- 3 ruling allowed the federal government to provide nationwide tax subsidies to help Americans buy health insurance in the Obamacare program.

However, in the 2012 ruling that upheld Obamacare’s individual mandate requiring Americans to obtain health insurance, Kennedy sided with the conservative dissent. He said the court’s majority “regards its statutory interpretation as modest. It is not. It amounts to a vast judicial overreaching. It creates a debilitated, inoperable version of healthcare regulation that Congress did not enact and the public does not expect.”

The Stanford and Harvard Law School-educated Kennedy served on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the western U.S. before his appointment to the highest U.S. court. His tenure on the Supreme Court lasted more than three decades.

Kennedy will turn 82 only days before his planned date of retirement.