The US Supreme Court has grow nmore conservative with the addition of President Bush's two nominees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. But it will be a third justice, Anthony Kennedy, who will likely decide how far to the right the law moves under the new lineup of justices at the nation's highest court.

"Kennedy now holds the center of gravity on the court," says Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University. Prior to her retirement in January, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was frequently called the most powerful woman in the country. As a centrist on the nine-member Supreme Court, she often cast the fifth and deciding vote in some of the nation's most contentious and important cases.

In years past, Kennedy shared the swing-vote designation with O'Connor. But with her departure he occupies the court's decisive center alone. That puts Kennedy in an even more powerful position than O'Connor, legal analysts say.

"He who casts the decisive vote is going to be the person with all the power," says Michael Dorf, a constitutional law professor at Columbia University Law School in New York.

Tom Goldstein, a Washington lawyer who has argued 16 cases at the Supreme Court, described Kennedy's emergence at a recent gathering of the American Constitution Society. "The basic principle you should understand is it is Justice Kennedy's world and you just live in it."

Kennedy's power was on full display last week when he joined the court's liberal wing to forcefully strike down President Bush's plan to put terror suspects on trial before military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

In other actions during the term, he cast the decisive vote in a case that makes it easier for convicted criminals to get another chance to present claims of innocence to a judge. He sided with the court's liberals in rebuking former Attorney General John Ashcroft for attempting to use his rule-making power to invalidate Oregon's physician-assisted suicide law. And he provided the decisive fifth vote to invalidate a congressional district in Texas drawn to protect an incumbent Republican.

On the conservative side, Kennedy provided the key fifth vote to uphold a Kansas death penalty statute that allowed the imposition of a death sentence even when jurors found that aggravating and mitigating factors concerning the crime and the defendant were evenly balanced. He voted with the conservatives to limit the scope of federal authority to protect the nation's water resources under the Clean Water Act. And he provided the decisive vote to eliminate application of the exclusionary rule to evidence obtained by police who fail to knock and announce their presence before bursting into a private home with a search warrant.

While such results demonstrate Kennedy's power to break deadlocks, they understate his role at the high court, legal analysts say.

Page: 1 | 2