Playin’ the name game: Justice Kennedy picks up honor

Listen to this article

By MARK SHERMAN
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congress is the absolute best place to work if you want to get something named for you before you are dead and buried. Mitch McConnell Riverwalk and Plaza in Owensboro, Ky., and City College’s Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service in New York are but two of dozens of examples.

But the Supreme Court isn’t bad, either.

The names of four of the nine justices grace highway interchanges, public housing, prizes and libraries.

Justice Anthony Kennedy is the newest addition to this last category. He is in his hometown of Sacramento, Calif., this week for the dedication of the Kennedy Library and Learning Center and the unveiling of a bust of the justice at the federal courthouse in the state capital.

Kennedy’s name also is on the Sacramento chapter of a professional association of lawyers, the Anthony M. Kennedy Inn of Court.

For sheer size, the Bronx public housing project where Justice Sonia Sotomayor grew up tops the list. The Sonia Sotomayor Houses, renamed in 2010 in the justice’s honor, encompass 28 seven-story buildings with 1,497 apartments and nearly 3,500 residents. Sotomayor described the project in her new memoir as sprawling over three large city blocks.

A childhood connection is important in the Savannah, Ga., area sites named for Justice Clarence Thomas.

The Clarence Thomas Center for Historic Preservation at the Savannah College of Art and Design is located at the former convent for the nuns who ran Thomas’ elementary school. The Thomas wing at the renovated Carnegie Library in Savannah is a nod to the era of segregation when blacks could not use the city’s public library and Thomas instead spent hours at the Carnegie Library. A few miles west of Savannah, the intersection of Interstates 16 and 95 also bears the justice’s name.

The most modest recognition of a sitting justice is Columbia Law School’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg Prize, which goes to students who got excellent grades in all three years of law school. Ginsburg got her law degree from Columbia.