This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 27th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The concept of dignity has come to take an important place in recent Supreme Court

decisions.

Dignity itself is an important value, but as a constitutional principle,

it's at best fuzzy, and at worst, dangerous.

So says Roger Pallon, Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Cato Institute.

How did dignity come to take such a prominent place in the Supreme Court jurisprudence of late? Well, we can probably thank Justice Kennedy for that, at least over the recent past.

In fact, if you go back and look at the 1988 Senate confirmation hearings for him, you'll see that he spoke of a right to human

dignity.

Well, that raised quite a few sharp questions, as you might expect, mostly from the Republicans.

They were concerned that this might lead to the kind

of judicial activism that at that point in time was a great concern of theirs.

But since then he's mentioned dignity a good many times in oral argument and his opinions.

In fact, just last month, an oral argument in the same-sex marriage cases, he did so no fewer than five times.

And not surprisingly, the lawyers for the petitioners mentioned dignity many more times.

That was an obvious appeal, of course, to Kennedy, since he's likely to be the swing vote in those cases

But his appeal to dignity goes far back

Most famously probably in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v Casey decision that reaffirmed

the core of Roe v. Wade that's where his famous Sweet Mystery of Life passage came from that Justice Scalia has made a good

deal of fun over in the intervening years.

Kennedy is not alone in appealing to dignity, though Justice Sotomayor and some others do it too.

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