In 1996, Kennedy wrote the court's first opinion that struck down a law because it denied gays and lesbians the equal protection of the laws. "A state cannot deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws," he wrote.
No one thought the original Constitution would have outlawed discrimination against homosexuals, but equal rights today must include gays and lesbians, Kennedy said.
Two years ago, he spoke for the court again in throwing out a Texas law that allowed police to arrest gays and lesbians for having sex at home.
In a broadly written opinion, Kennedy said gays "are entitled to respect for their private life. The state cannot demean their existence" by deeming them as a class of criminals, he said.
To some of his friends, it was a bit jarring to see Kennedy, a strait-laced family man and devout Catholic, emerge as a hero of the gay-rights movement. But Kennedy said his duty to the Constitution demanded just such a result.
As if to counter Scalia, he closed his opinion in the gay-rights case by saying the framers of the Constitution would have welcomed such a ruling.
"They knew times can blind us to certain truths, and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress," Kennedy said. "As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their search for greater freedom."
Kennedy, 68, has three grown children and says he is well-settled into the job that has no retirement age. In conversation, he speaks with enthusiasm about architecture, literature and the theater.
In Sacramento, he had taught evening classes at the University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law, and since joining the high court, he has taught McGeorge's summer law classes in Salzburg, Austria. Not surprisingly, he has become a student of European and international law.
In last week's death penalty opinion, Kennedy noted that the United States "stood alone in the world" in permitting the execution of juveniles, a comment that drew a harsh rebuke from Scalia. The views of "like-minded foreigners" should play no role in the court's opinions, he said.
The split between Scalia and Kennedy goes back more than a decade. At first, they seemed to have much in common. They were born in 1936, grew up in Catholic families, went to high school in the '50s and then to Harvard Law School. Both were Republicans and were put on the courts by Reagan. When Kennedy moved to the Washington area in 1988, he and his wife, Mary, bought a house in the same McLean, Va., neighborhood as Scalia.
