Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The paper argues that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s decisions in religious establishment cases have been consistent with larger political regime forces as defined by public opinion, legislative developments, and interest-group behavior. I suggest that the positions of Rehnquist Court justices, and specifically Justice Kennedy, have not been constrained by either the Lemon jurisprudential regime or the numerous separationist precedents articulated in a far more separationist political era. If this is so, then jurisprudential regimes are not the legal constraint on judicial decision making that recent research suggests. Instead, jurisprudential regimes shift and evolve with larger political regime transformations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion for the Court in Lawrence v. Texas was groundbreaking not only for overturning Bowers v. Hardwick, but also for the method of constitutional interpretation used to justify that result. This opinion explicitly rejects originalism, but it does not adopt the analysis based on the right to privacy as argued in Justice Blackmun’s dissent in Bowers. Instead, Kennedy relies on an expansive definition of liberty that substantially differs in foundations and results from the right to privacy articulated in Griswold and Roe.
This paper tracks Kennedy’s development of this alternative approach to constitutional interpretation. Part One chronicles statements made by Kennedy prior to his appointment to the Court. At that time, he rejected the terminology of the right to privacy but—unlike originalists—he defended a judicial duty to enforce the full and necessary meaning of liberty. Part Two focuses on Kennedy’s effort in Lawrence to articulate and develop this liberty-based approach in place of the right to privacy. Part Three surveys the objections to Kennedy’s approach articulated in Justice Scalia’s dissent, and examines how both opinions challenge the approach of the New Deal and Warren Courts. The paper concludes by situating Lawrence within Kennedy’s larger effort to construct a careful, reasoned balance to constitutional interpretation that seeks to avoid the excesses of both the Warren Court and the originalist reaction.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, signed in 1963, was the first arms control agreement signed between the two Cold War superpowers. Yet, despite a broad consensus in the United States, a stated desire by the Soviet Union, and worldwide support to reach an agreement, nearly ten years passed between the initial proposal for a the ban and its actual signing. This paper explores the causes of this delay during the Kennedy administration. President Kennedy was confident that he could come to a swift agreement when he came into office, but it took most of his truncated presidency to reach just a partial agreement. Again and again Kennedy believed he was close to reaching an agreement with his counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, only to have his hopes dashed. Khrushchev’s repeated actions caused Kennedy to stop viewing the negotiations as a way to reach an agreement, but instead as a propaganda platform where he could show the world it was Soviet intransigence that blocked agreement. Interestingly, the Cuban Missile Crisis and its aftermath spurred both sides to finally reach an agreement. Examining these negotiations in detail can provide lessons for contemporary negotiations over nuclear programs.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Sherie M. Randolph
Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, African American Studies and Research Program
smr205@nyu.edu

Several decades after the political upheavals of the sixties very few people recognize the name of the black feminist lawyer and activist Florynce “Flo” Kennedy (1916-2000). However, during the late 1960s and 1970s Kennedy was the most well-known black feminist in the country. When reporting on the emergence of the women’s movement the news media covered her early membership in the National Organization for Women (NOW), her leadership of countless guerilla theatre protests and her work as a lawyer helping to repeal New York’s restrictive abortion laws. Indeed, black feminist Jane Galvin-Lewis and white feminists Gloria Steinem and Ti-Grace Atkinson credit Kennedy with helping to educate a generation of young women about feminism and radical political organizing more generally.

Despite Kennedy’s visibility at the time as a spokesperson and leader of the mainstream feminist movement, Kennedy’s activism has since been marginalized or completely erased from most histories of “second wave” feminism. On the rare occasion that Kennedy is mentioned, it is usually only to reference her exceptional status as one of the few black women involved in the mainstream white feminist movement. The exclusion of key black feminist organizers from most feminist scholarship on the movement speaks to the ways in which feminist literature has failed to see black women as progenitors of contemporary feminism. Kennedy is a significant exemplar of this phenomenon. This article resurrects Kennedy’s political contribution to sixties radicalism and uncovers a black feminist politics and practice that was not only connected to the mainstream feminist movement but was also closely allied to the Black Power struggle. In doing so, this work challenges previously held false dichotomies between the Black Power and women’s liberation movements and illuminates the centrality of black feminism and Flo Kennedy to both movements.

Kennedy’s example in these various spaces provides a critical window into the influence of Black Power on second wave feminisms and how the boundaries around organizations and movements were far more porous than scholars have previously conceived. By labeling Black Power as primarily an antagonistic influence on feminism, scholars have missed seeing the moments where there was a logical partnership between feminism(s) and Black Power. To be more precise, Kennedy’s example helps us to center Black Power as a pivotal ideological influence on the radical white feminist and black feminist politics and movements that emerged in the ’60s and ’70s.