Anthony McLeod Kennedy was born on July 23, 1936 in Sacramento, California. The second of his parent's three children, Kennedy grew up in the quietly conservative rural central California region. Growing up, Sacramento represented a quiet, hardworking and family and faith centered life. Anthony was a second generation lawyer. Kennedy's father, Anthony J. Kennedy, was an attorney and lobbyist for various local and regional Sacramento businesses. His father had a well-established law practice and a reputation for influence in the California legislature. His mother, Galdys McLeod, focused on her family and community. At the age of 10 Anthony took a year off from school to serve as a page in the California State Senate. .
Kennedy attended a local Sacramento high school and Stanford University. He spent a year of his undergraduate studies at the London School of Economics and earned his A.B. and a Phi Beta Kappa key in 1958. Prof. Robert A. Horn, now emeritus, who taught Mr. Kennedy's constitutional law, remembers him as "extremely intelligent" and scholarly even as an undergraduate. "He was conservative but not a right-wing ideologue," Professor Horn said. "His personality is such that I cannot imagine his being a zealot or a fanatic." The professor said he was struck by how "courteous" the student was. After Stanford, Kennedy enrolled in Harvard Law School where he graduated cum laude. His roommate at Harvard, R. Dobie Langenkamp, now in the oil business in Tulsa, says that his friend "wanted to be a judge virtually all the time I knew him." Langenkamp said his roommate was deeply influenced by his parents' Republicanism. Kennedy returned to California after law school and worked as an associate for a law firm in San Francisco. When his father died unexpectedly in 1963, Anthony returned to Sacramento. That year was a turning point in the young lawyer's life. His father left his personal financial affairs in extraordinary disarray.
