This is the “disaster” Kennedy foresaw: a multigeneration conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Since the 1990s, the court has been in ideological equipoise: a conservative bloc and a liberal bloc, each regularly finding itself in the position of needing to win the vote of Justice Anthony Kennedy (or, until her retirement in 2006, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor)…

Prof. Jeffrey Segal, the chair of the political-science department at Stony Brook University and a leading court scholar, said that justices “absolutely” should consider the political implications of their retirement.

“If you believe in women’s rights the way that Justice Ginsburg obviously does, or abortion rights or any of the other things that she so strongly believes in, why would you want—on this closely divided court—why would you want your retirement to set in motion an undoing of the things that you’ve spent your lifetime accomplishing?”