In news that has sent shockwaves through the US political establishment, US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has announced his retirement. Kennedy has been a swing vote among the Court’s nine justices and his vote often decided contentious cases on a slim 5-4 margin. Although appointed by a Republican President, he was reliably liberal on social issues such as abortion and gay-marriage. It is now up to President Trump to nominate his successor who will also need to be confirmed by a simple majority vote in the US Senate, a chamber that currently has a Republican majority. Trump is expected to pick a candidate who would curb the Court’s tendency toward ‘judicial activism’ where judges have ended up ‘making law’ instead of just ‘interpreting it’. The most egregious example of this in the past fifty years was the landmark Roe v Wade case that overturned state-law in all fifty US States and imposed an extreme abortion regime on the whole country. There is a chance now that Kennedy’s successor would tilt the Court to a pro-life majority and overturn or amend Roe v Wade. This would return abortion law to the normal democratic processes, allowing parliaments in each State to decide for themselves what law to adopt, rather than being dictated by a Court impervious to institutional checks and balances.