On March 15, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, Justice Anthony Kennedy presided over the trial of Hamlet. “All rise!” commanded a bailiff in Elizabethan ruffles. “The Honorable the Eastern High Court for the Kingdom of Denmark is now in session!” As the sold-out house rose to its feet, Kennedy strode onto the bare stage in his black robes, taking a seat behind a judge’s bench framed by an American flag and an enormous portrait of Shakespeare. “Please be seated,” he said graciously.

For the next two hours, Kennedy watched benignly as the defense and prosecution conducted an entertaining debate about whether or not Hamlet was insane. When one of the defense witnesses insisted that Hamlet suffered from a bipolar disorder characterized by grandiosity and the “ambivalence that is one of the cardinal symptoms of psychosis,” Kennedy smiled as if to acknowledge his own reputation for Hamlet-like indecision. He seemed irritated only when Abbe Lowell, who defended President Clinton in his impeachment trial and was now prosecuting Hamlet, explained the difference between fact and delusion by noting that “you may be deluded about who won the 2000 election, but that doesn’t make it a fact.” (Kennedy cast the tiebreaking vote to stop the Florida recount in Bush v. Gore.) Deliberating after the closing arguments, the jury eventually arrived at a verdict: six votes for sanity; six for insanity. And then, like an Elizabethan chorus waiting for its cue, Kennedy walked to the edge of the stage to lecture the audience about the moral of the evening. “The law and literature have this in common: We seek to impose order on a disordered reality; we seek to bring rationality to an existence that can be irrational and chaotic,” Kennedy declared. “It seems to me that’s what this day is about and what the law is about.”

Anthony Kennedy seems most at home when he is lecturing others about morality. And now all of us have little choice but to pay attention. With the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor, Kennedy is relishing his role as the new swing justice on an evenly divided court. As Kennedy goes, so goes America: As he votes to uphold partial-birth abortion laws or to strike down President Bush’s military tribunals, lo shall they be upheld or struck down. Fawning lawyers must write briefs to Kennedy alone, and breathless commentators try to predict which laws he will bless or reprove. Many accounts of Kennedy cast him as an indecisive justice--“Flipper,” as the law clerks unkindly put it in a Supreme Court skit--who swings left or right in an anxious effort to court the approval of Washington elites: the Hamlet of the Supreme Court. But these accounts misunderstand Kennedy and his worldview. According to a recent study by Lee Epstein of Northwestern University and other political scientists, far from being unpredictable, Kennedy is one of the most consistent justices in recent history—displaying far less leftward ideological drift since the early ’90s than O’Connor or even former Chief Justice William Rehnquist. From the beginning, Kennedy’s performance on the Court has been defined not by indecision but by self-dramatizing utopianism. He believes it is the role of the Court in general and himself in particular to align the messy reality of American life with an inspiring and highly abstracted set of ideals. He thinks that great judges, like great literary figures, have both the power and the duty to “impose order on a disordered reality,” as he told the Kennedy Center audience. By forcing legislators to respect a series of moralistic abstractions about liberty, equality, and dignity, judges, he believes, can create a national consensus about American values that will usher in what he calls “the golden age of peace.” This lofty vision has made Kennedy the Court’s most activist justice—that is, the justice who votes to strike down more state and federal laws combined than any of his colleagues.

Kennedy often complains about the “loneliness” of his position, which stems from the fact that he has no reliable public constituency: Both liberals and conservatives tend to view him as a self-aggrandizing turncoat. “Oh, I suppose everyone would like it if everyone applauded when he walked down the street,” he said in an interview. “There is loneliness.”

But, when it comes time to hand down decisions, Kennedy shows little ambivalence about the centrality of his role in our national drama. His opinions are full of Manichean platitudes about liberty and equality that acknowledge no uncertainty. “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt,” he wrote in his decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 opinion upholding the core of Roe v. Wade. “Preferment by race, when resorted to by the State, can be the most divisive of all policies, containing within it the potential to destroy confidence in the Constitution and in the idea of equality,” he intoned in a 2003 dissent from the Court’s decision to uphold affirmative action in law schools. Kennedy does indeed agonize before reaching his decisions, and he has dramatically switched his vote in high-profile cases. Yet he seems to agonize not because he is genuinely ambivalent or humble but because he thinks that agonizing is something a great judge should do, to show that he takes seriously the awesome magnitude of his task.