In news that has sent shockwaves through the US political establishment, US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has announced his retirement [1]. 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’ [2] 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.