Justice Kennedy has been off the Court for about seven years. His new memoir will be released on October 14. Last year it was reported that the memoir would be a two-volume set, but now it seems to have been whittled down to a single 352-page tome. I imagine the publisher took this step to recoup whatever advance they paid some years ago.
I have very mixed feelings about this book. One the one hand, I am truly curious how Justice Kennedy--long the center of the Court--decided cases. On the other hand, I truly don't care. Nothing he says will have any bearing on the direction of constitutional law, and for that I am grateful. Justice Barrett wrote a pithy book called Listening to the Law, which explains how she tries to figure out the objective meaning of the Constitution. Justice Kennedy's book may as well be called The Law Listened To Me, as his personal proclivities determined what code governed us all.
Nina Totenberg interviewed Kennedy. She wrote that the book was "very interesting," unlike many other books by Justices that are "sigh, pretty boring." (I think Totenberg would place Justice Barrett's new book in that category.) What makes the book interesting is that it is not really about "law" in the formal sense. Those niceties were never very important for Justice Kennedy. From what I can tell, the book describes a philosopher king who tried to grapple with very difficult conceptual issues, and came to settlements that he thought were best. That sounds like a fascinating book, if it wasn't so horrifying that one person wielded this power for decades, and apparently still lacks the self-awareness to see why that arrangement is problematic.
