Interesting Excerpt…
…from the WSJ piece on Alan Gura linked below:
The court’s close division meant that Mr. Gura needed the vote of Anthony Kennedy. Most court-watchers consider him the least predictable justice, but not Mr. Gura: “I received a lot of grief from people about Justice Kennedy going into the argument. We were told that we were not responsible, gambling on the views of this one justice who might be completely inscrutable and unpredictable. . . .
“Justice Kennedy did not trouble me all that much. The fact is that if you look at Justice Kennedy’s voting pattern, the cases where he tends to disappoint the so-called conservative bloc — in almost all those cases, Justice Kennedy sides with a claim of an individual right being held by a person against the government, whether that is in the abortion context, or whether that’s in the context of intimate sexual relations, whether it’s the habeas case in Guantanamo Bay.”
However, Kennedy voted against Suzette Kelo in Kelo v New London. He even wrote a concurring opinion in that case.
Almost always isn’t always.