This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Friday, June 29th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Shortly following the end of the Supreme Court's most recent term, Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the bench.

I spoke yesterday with Cato's Walter Olson and Roger Pallon about some of the hits and misses of Kennedy's jurisprudence during his time on the Supreme Court.

What was Anthony Kennedy's view of government power and its limits.

Well, if I may start on that question, it seems to me that if you start from a classical liberal understanding of the Constitution

which we at Cato do, then we view it as authorizing limited powers to secure individual rights and do the few other things that it's

authorized to do. And from that vision, much of the jurisprudence that's before the court gives you fairly clear answers.

The problem with Justice Kennedy, however, is that he often reached conclusions that we at Cato agreed with.

Often he did not as well, but he seemed to have no theory of the matter.

It was very difficult to discern exactly how he got to his conclusions except for some vague notion

of dignity and that's what left us scratching our heads.

And if I may I'd like to start with a couple of cases on the power side, we're probably going to talk mostly about rights, and that's where he shown the most.

But as you know the New Deal Constitution Revolution opened the door for massive government,

but justice and we at Cato in the early 90s were pressing for a revival of the doctrine of enumerated powers, the idea that Congress's powers are limited.

And when we saw a case coming along called United States v. Lopez,

coming out of the Fifth Circuit where all Judge Garwood

had said that he invoking James Manison that the powers of the federal government are few and defined.

We said, whoa, this is just the kind of case we were looking for.

And we didn't do briefs in those days.

We did policy analysis.

And so we got one from Instapundant.

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