Anthony Kennedy Quotes
The law is always in transition.
Anthony Kennedy, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Introduction of Professor Andrew Kull, Supreme Court Historical Lecture, C-SPAN, May 19, 1998
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The American troops were fighting and dying to protect Iraq freedom and this incident caused much soul searching in America. Political pressure was brought to bear on the Kurds and Talabany announced that Kamal Sayid Qadir would be pardoned and released from jail. However, he acknowledged that the laws themselves had to be reformed to make them more democratic. See {589503} for the law.
He had visited the House of Commons. The “problems” resulted from the fact that the English had to make their own laws rather than have them provided by God as in Islamic legal systems—Sharia.
The dramatic thing about this quotation is that in public, the mantra of conservatives about the courts of America is that they make and change laws as opposed to just interpreting and clarifying the laws. They traditionally accuse judges who rule against their favorite positions as using the courts as an instrument of political and social change. Here a leading conservative federal jurist, who thereafter became a member of the Supreme Court, was acknowledging and advocating the courts as instruments for conservative social, economic, and political change.
See John Stuart Mill for a similar English quotation that very year.
Anthony McLeod Kennedy is a retired American lawyer and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1988 until his retirement in 2018. He was nominated to the court in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan, and sworn in on February 18, 1988. After the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor in 2006, he was the swing vote on many of the Roberts Court's 5–4 decisions.
