Justice Anthony M. Kennedy was for years the most powerful member of the Supreme Court. His place at the court’s ideological center made his vote so crucial that lawyers sometimes seemed to direct their arguments almost solely to him. His fellow justices grew more attentive whenever he asked a question.
He has made few public statements since his retirement in 2018, which set the stage for the court’s decisive shift to the right. But in a two-hour conversation last week in his Supreme Court chambers overlooking the Capitol, he denounced what he said was a spike in ignorance, partisanship and vulgarity in the nation’s public life.
The justice also discussed why he thinks his majority opinion establishing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage a decade ago should endure, a question the court may soon face. He talked about his bitter falling out with Justice Antonin Scalia and their reconciliation shortly before his colleague’s death in 2016. He criticized originalism, the dominant mode of constitutional interpretation among conservatives. And he reflected on his relationship with President Trump, whose rise appears to have played a role in the justice’s critique of declining civility in public discourse.
The occasion for the interview was a memoir to be published next week, “Life, Law and Liberty.” Part autobiography and part overview of the key decisions in his 30 years on the Supreme Court, the book is studded with candid reflections and sharp observations.
Some of them seemed aimed at Mr. Trump.
“The Constitution does not work if any one branch of the government insists on the exercise of its powers to the extreme,” he wrote. Asked in the interview whether that principle was being tested these days, he said, “I think it’s rather clear that it is.”
He also wrote critically of elected officials who lack “kindness, wit, empathy, dignity” and similar qualities.
“Perhaps those who bring vulgarity to our nation may not have a true psychosis of narcissism,” he wrote, “but by their conduct they display the same elements as those with that affliction — they are so self-important that they enjoy degrading others.”
Asked whether he was thinking of anyone in particular, he said, “I’ll just say, generally, I’m amazed at what I sometimes will hear on television.”
He is 89, but he still comes to the court a couple of times a week, often joining the other justices for lunch. He shares a law clerk with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who succeeded him.
Like other justices who stepped down from active service on the Supreme Court, he did not formally retire. He has, rather, assumed senior status and continues to attend ceremonies like the State of the Union address and to work with groups like the American Bar Association. “I do a lot with foreign governments,” he said.
He pointed out the artwork in his chambers, including a portrait of Alexander Hamilton. “The National Gallery wants him back,” he said, unconcerned. “They could file a lawsuit, I guess.”
A small statue of a Pony Express rider sits by his desk, a replica of the original in his hometown, Sacramento, Calif. He was a lawyer there when he got to know the state’s governor, Ronald Reagan, who urged President Gerald R. Ford to nominate him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He was just 38 when he joined that court in 1975, becoming the youngest federal appeals court judge in the nation.
Mr. Reagan, by then president, nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1987, after his first choice, Judge Robert H. Bork, was rejected by the Senate and his second, Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, withdrew after it was revealed that he had smoked marijuana as a young law professor.
At the time of his nomination, Justice Kennedy was 51 and lived in the California house where he grew up. He was confirmed by a vote of 97 to 0, the last member of the court to be approved unanimously.
As a justice, he leaned mostly right, siding with the court’s conservatives to strike down campaign finance laws, to gut the Voting Rights Act and to expand the scope of the Second Amendment. But he joined the court’s liberals in cases on abortion, affirmative action and the death penalty.
Justice Kennedy also turned out to be the greatest judicial champion of gay rights in the nation’s history, the author of the majority opinions in four of the court’s landmark gay rights rulings, culminating in the 2015 decision establishing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
The rulings were met by cutting dissents from Justice Scalia, who wrote, for instance, that he would “hide my head in a bag” if he ever joined an opinion that began, as the 2015 one did, with this sentence: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.”
But the blow that really stung, Justice Kennedy wrote, was his colleague’s statement in 2015 that there were no genuine Westerners on the court because “California does not count.”
That comment, he said last week, was “way out of line,” as “my upbringing was very much in the West.”
It led to a rift, one that did not start to heal until the next February, when Justice Scalia came to visit. “We had the conversation right here,” Justice Kennedy recalled, “and he was really concerned that he’d gone too hard. He was in earnest, and he was being honest about the fact that he changed his mind and that he was intemperate.”
Justice Scalia, an enthusiastic traveler, was setting off on a hunting trip in Texas, during which he would die in his sleep. “And the last thing he said was, ‘Tony, this is my last long trip,’” Justice Kennedy said. “Which turned out to have multiple meanings.”
When the court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, Justice Clarence Thomas issued a concurring opinion urging reconsideration of the same-sex marriage case, Obergefell v. Hodges.
Justice Kennedy declined to comment on Justice Thomas’s opinion. But he said that “a powerful argument against” overruling the decision was the “tremendous amount of reliance” that same-sex couples and their families had placed on the decision.
“The argument for,” he said, “is that we should return power to the states, but that sometimes has consequences that we haven’t foreseen yet.”
The justices will consider whether to hear an appeal asking them to overrule Obergefell in the coming weeks. The request came from Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who was sued after refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
In one of his last majority opinions, about a Colorado baker who refused to create a custom cake for a same sex-wedding, Justice Kennedy seemed unable to choose between two of his core commitments: gay rights and free speech.
“It was very hard, and it’s still a fascinating case, because of the competing basic fundamental principles,” Justice Kennedy said last week.
In the end, he chose an off-ramp that not everyone found convincing. He wrote that the baker, Jack Phillips, should win because he had been treated unfairly by members of a civil rights commission who had made comments hostile to religion.
“In a way, it looks like you’re getting rid of having to decide a hard case on the merits,” he said. “On the other hand, in an issue of that importance, it is essential that all of the rules have been followed.”
In his book, Justice Kennedy disclosed that Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist had assigned him the majority opinion in Bush v. Gore, the 2000 decision that delivered the presidency to President George W. Bush. It was “a close case” and “a close call,” he wrote, and he concluded that the majority opinion should be unsigned, which it was.
The court issued its decision, by a 5-to-4 vote on the key issue, the day after the case was argued. Justice Kennedy said that sort of quick action, like the court’s recent spate of emergency rulings, was not ideal.
“The court just has to do the best that it can,” he said. “But it does need time.”
Justice Kennedy said he was pleased to be succeeded by one of his former law clerks, Justice Kavanaugh, whom he called a tireless worker.
He confirmed that he had been consulted about the choice by the White House, adding that “in various of his appointments the president did.” Several of Justice Kennedy’s former clerks sit on federal appeals courts.
Justice Kennedy also confirmed that Mr. Trump is fond of his son Justin, who worked at Deutsche Bank when Mr. Trump, then a real estate developer, was a major client. His son “was instrumental in giving Trump some key things,” Justice Kennedy said, “and Trump likes him very much.”
That was apparent in an exchange after Mr. Trump’s first address to Congress in February 2017. On his way out, the president greeted the justice.
“Say hello to your boy,” Mr. Trump said. “Special guy.”
Some liberals have complained about the family connection, believing it might have helped prompt Justice Kennedy’s retirement under Mr. Trump and could have given his endorsement of Justice Kavanaugh greater weight.
In the interview, Justice Kennedy said he had reservations about originalism, which seeks to interpret the Constitution as it was originally understood and has become the intellectual core of the conservative legal movement. Originalism is a starting place, the justice said, but it cannot be the whole story.
“The framers were not so self-assured that they thought they knew every component of liberty,” he said. “The meaning of liberty is disclosed over time.”
He acknowledged that his view empowered judges. “So what is it that prevents the court from ruling on every interesting and important and essential political and social issue of our times?” he asked, suggesting that there must be some constraints.
Asked to describe those constraints, he said, “You just have to, in case by case, decide whether or not this is absolutely essential to liberty.”
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
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