David Souter

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David Hackett Souter
Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court
In office October 9, 1990 – June 29, 2009
Nominated by	George H. W. Bush
Preceded by	William J. Brennan
Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit
In office May 25, 1990 – October 9, 1990
Nominated by	George H. W. Bush
Associate Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court
In office 1983 – 1990
Appointed by	John H. Sununu
Associate Justice of the New Hampshire Superior Court
In office 1978 – 1983
Appointed by	Meldrim Thomson, Jr.
Attorney General of New Hampshire
In office 1976 – 1978
Appointed by	Meldrim Thomson, Jr.
Preceded by	Warren Rudman
Deputy Attorney General of New Hampshire
In office 1971 – 1976
Appointed by	Warren Rudman
Born	September 17, 1939 (1939-09-17) (age 69) Melrose, Massachusetts
Alma mater	Harvard College Magdalen College, Oxford Harvard Law School
Religion	Episcopalian
Signature

For the Australian artist, see David Henry Souter.

David Hackett Souter (pronounced /ˈsuːtər/; born September 17, 1939) served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1990 until his retirement from the Court effective June 29, 2009. He filled the seat vacated by William J. Brennan, Jr.^[1]

Appointed by Republican President George H. W. Bush, Souter served on both the Rehnquist and current Roberts courts, and was often considered a member of the court's traditional liberal wing. In April 2009, Souter announced that he would be retiring at the end of the current Supreme Court term in June. On May 26, 2009, President Obama announced that he was nominating Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace Justice Souter on the Court. ^[2]

Contents 1 Early life and education 2 U.S. Supreme Court appointment 3 U.S. Supreme Court career 3.1 Expected conservatism 3.2 Decisions 3.2.1 Planned Parenthood v. Casey 3.2.2 Bush v. Gore 3.3 Relationship with other justices 4 Retirement 5 Personal life 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links

[edit] Early life and education

Souter was born in Melrose, Massachusetts, September 17, 1939. He is the only child of Joseph Alexander Souter (1904–1976) and Helen Adams Hackett Souter (1907–1995).^[3][4] After moving from Melrose at the age of 11, he spent most of his childhood and adolescence at his family's farm in Weare, New Hampshire.^[3] He attended Concord High School in New Hampshire.

He went on to Harvard College, from which he received his A.B., concentrating in philosophy and writing a senior thesis on the legal positivism of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the famous Supreme Court justice. In 1961, he graduated from Harvard magna cum laude as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He was selected as a Rhodes Scholar and earned an M.A. from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1963. He then entered Harvard Law School, graduating in 1966.

Souter worked as an associate at Orr & Reno in Concord, New Hampshire, from 1966 to 1968; he disliked private practice.^[3] He accepted a position as an Assistant Attorney General of New Hampshire in 1968, beginning his lifelong career in public service. As Assistant Attorney General he worked in the criminal division, prosecuting cases in the courts. In 1971, Warren Rudman, then the Attorney General of New Hampshire, selected him to be the Deputy Attorney General.

Rudman resigned to enter private practice in 1976, and Souter succeeded him as the Attorney General of New Hampshire. In 1978, he was named an Associate Justice of the Superior Court of New Hampshire at the urging of his friend Warren Rudman.^[3] As a judge on the Superior Court hearing cases in two counties, Souter was noted for the way he treated juries and defendants, for sometimes sketching witnesses from behind the bench, and for tough sentencing.^[3]

He was appointed to the New Hampshire Supreme Court as an Associate Justice in 1983. Passed over for an appointment as Chief Justice by New Hampshire Governor John H. Sununu in favor of a longer-serving associate justice, Souter considered leaving the court.^[3]

David Souter became a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on May 25, 1990, having been nominated January 24, 1990.

[edit] U.S. Supreme Court appointment

Warren Rudman, who had since been elected a senator, and former New Hampshire Governor John H. Sununu, then chief of staff to President George H. W. Bush, were instrumental in both his nomination and his confirmation to the Supreme Court. Prior to Sununu's recommendation, few observers outside of New Hampshire knew who Souter was,^[5] although he had been mentioned by The New York Times as one of Reagan's four top nominees for the Supreme Court slot that eventually went to Anthony Kennedy. Rudman had recommended Souter to Reagan's chief of staff Howard Baker for both a federal judgeship and the Supreme Court.^[3]

Bush originally wanted to appoint Clarence Thomas to Brennan's seat, but ultimately decided that Thomas did not have enough experience as a federal judge and decided to recommend Souter for the post instead.^[6]

President Bush nominated Souter as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court on July 25, 1990,^[7] and Souter took his seat on October 9, 1990, shortly after the United States Senate confirmed him by a vote of 90–9 after the Senate Judiciary Committee reported out the nomination by a vote of 14–3.

The nine senators voting against Souter included Ted Kennedy and John Kerry from Souter's neighboring state of Massachusetts. These senators, along with seven others, painted Souter as a right-winger in the mold of Robert Bork. They based their claim on Souter's friendships with many conservative politicians in New Hampshire. Their allegations failed to influence the other 90 senators. The press called him the "stealth justice"^[8] and reported that his professional record provoked little real controversy and provided very little "paper trail." President Bush saw this lack of a paper trail as a positive for Souter, because one of President Reagan's nominees, Bork, had recently been rejected by the Senate partially because of the availability of his extensive written opinions on issues.^[9] Bush claimed that he did not know Souter's stances on abortion, affirmative action, or other issues.^[3] The National Organization for Women opposed Souter's nomination and held a rally outside the hearings to oppose his selection.^[3] The then-president of NOW, Molly Yard, testified that Souter would "end... freedom for women in this country."^[10] Souter was also opposed by the NAACP, which urged its 500,000 members to write letters to their senators asking for Souter's defeat.^[11] Despite this opposition, Souter won an easy confirmation compared to those of later Republican appointees.^[12]

Souter spoke of his admiration for the conservative Justice John Marshall Harlan II of the Warren court, as well as for liberal Justice William Brennan of the same court, during his confirmation hearings.^[5] The Wall Street Journal described the events leading up to the appointment of the "liberal jurist" in a 2000 editorial, saying Rudman in his "Yankee Republican liberalism" took "pride in recounting how he sold Mr. Souter to gullible White House chief of staff John Sununu as a confirmable conservative. Then they both sold the judge to President Bush, who wanted above all else to avoid a confirmation battle."^[13] Rudman wrote in his memoir that he had "suspected all along" that Souter would not "overturn activist liberal precedents."^[3] Sununu later said that he had "a lot of disappointment" about Souter's positions on the court and would have preferred him to be more similar to Justice Antonin Scalia.^[3]

After Souter was sworn in, he said:

“

The first lesson, simple as it is, is that whatever court we're in, whatever we are doing, at the end of our task some human being is going to be affected. Some human life is going to be changed by what we do. And so we had better use every power of our minds and our hearts and our beings to get those rulings right.

”

[edit] U.S. Supreme Court career

Souter, along with former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Stephen Breyer, has a reputation for being a strong guardian of the Court's institutional integrity.^{[citation needed][clarification needed]} A traditionalist in this regard, he stated in response to proposals to videotape oral arguments before the Supreme Court: "I can tell you the day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it's going to roll over my dead body."^[14]

He has also served as the court's designated representative to Congress on at least one occasion, testifying before committees of that body about the court's needs for additional funding to refurbish its building and for other projects.^[3]

[edit] Expected conservatism

At the time of Souter's appointment, John Sununu assured President Bush and conservatives that Souter would be a "home run" for conservatism.^[9] In his testimony before the Senate, Souter espoused the concepts of originalism (as Bork had done) and was thus thought by conservatives to be a strict constructionist on constitutional matters.^[9] However, in the state attorney general's office and as a state Supreme Court judge, he had never been tested on matters of federal law.^[6]

Initially, from 1990 to 1993, Souter tended to be a conservative-leaning justice, although not as conservative as Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas or William Rehnquist.^{[original research?]} In Souter's first year, Souter and Scalia voted alike close to 85 percent of the time; Souter voted with Kennedy and O'Connor about 97 percent of the time.^{[citation needed]} The symbolic turning point came in two cases in 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey,^[9] in which the Court reaffirmed the essential holding in Roe v. Wade, and Lee v. Weisman, in which Souter voted against allowing prayer at a high school graduation ceremony. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Anthony Kennedy considered overturning Roe and upholding all the restrictions at issue in Casey. Souter considered upholding all the restrictions but still was uneasy about overturning Roe. After consulting with O'Connor, however, the three (who came to be known as the "troika") developed a joint opinion that upheld all the restrictions in the Casey case except for the mandatory notification of a husband while asserting the essential holding of Roe, that a right to an abortion is protected by the Constitution.

After the appointment of Clarence Thomas, Souter moved to the middle.^[5] By the late 1990s, Souter began to align himself more with Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg on rulings, although as of 1995, he sided on more occasions with the more liberal^[15] justice, John Paul Stevens, than either Breyer or Ginsburg, both Clinton appointees.^[9] O'Connor began to move to the center. On the abortion issue, Souter began to vote to override restrictions he believed in back in 1992. On death penalty cases, worker rights cases, criminal rights cases, and other issues, Souter began voting with the liberals in the court. So while appointed by a Republican president and thus expected to be conservative,^[16] Souter came to be considered part of the liberal wing of the court.

[edit] Decisions

[edit] Planned Parenthood v. Casey

In 1992's Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Souter wrote that Roe v. Wade should not be overturned because it would be "a surrender to political pressure... So to overrule under fire in the absence of the most compelling reason to re-examine a watershed decision would subvert the Court's legitimacy beyond any serious question."^[9] Justice Scalia dissented, writing that "the Imperial Judiciary lives."^[5]

[edit] Bush v. Gore

In 2000, Souter voted and dissented along with three other justices in Bush v. Gore to allow the presidential election recount to continue while the majority voted to end the recount. This allowed the declaration of Bush as the winner of the election in Florida to stand.

Jeffrey Toobin wrote, controversially, of Souter's reaction to Bush v. Gore in his 2007 book The Nine:

“

Toughened, or coarsened, by their worldly lives, the other dissenters could shrug and move on, but Souter couldn’t. His whole life was being a judge. He came from a tradition where the independence of the judiciary was the foundation of the rule of law. And Souter believed Bush v. Gore mocked that tradition. His colleagues’ actions were so transparently, so crudely partisan that Souter thought he might not be able to serve with them anymore. Souter seriously considered resigning. For many months, it was not at all clear whether he would remain as a justice. That the Court met in a city he loathed made the decision even harder. At the urging of a handful of close friends, he decided to stay on, but his attitude toward the Court was never the same. There were times when David Souter thought of Bush v. Gore and wept.[17]

”

The above passage was, however, disputed by Souter's long-time friend, Warren Rudman. Rudman told the New Hampshire Union Leader that while Souter was discomfited by Bush v. Gore, the idea that he had broken down into tears over the matter was not true.^[17]

[edit] Relationship with other justices

Souter worked well with Sandra Day O'Connor and was in good relations with both her and her husband during her days on the court.^[3] He generally has a good working relationship with each justice on the court, but he is particularly fond of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and he considers John Paul Stevens to be the "smartest" justice.^[3]

[edit] Retirement

On April 30, 2009, NPR reported that Justice Souter planned to retire at the end of the October 2008 term of the court, in June 2009, or as soon thereafter as his successor was confirmed.^[18] NPR's Nina Totenberg reported:

“

Souter is expected to remain on the bench until a successor has been chosen and confirmed, which may or may not be accomplished before the court reconvenes in October.[18]

”

Subsequently, Souter's retirement was announced by President Barack Obama, at an unanticipated appearance at the daily White House press briefing on May 1, 2009. The same day, the Supreme Court released a letter from Justice Souter to the President, which indicated that Souter would be retiring when the court rose for its summer recess. The letter did not state that Souter would stay on the court until his successor was confirmed, meaning that he would leave the Court by the end of June. It did state that Souter intended "to continue to render substantial judicial service as an Associate Justice"—an apparent reference to the ability of a retired justice to serve by designation as a judge of a United States Court of Appeals or United States District Court. Souter's letter to Obama was as follows:

“

Dear Mr. President: When the Supreme Court rises for the summer recess this year, I intend to retire from regular active service as a Justice, under the provisions of 28 U.S.C. § 371(b)(1), having attained the age and met the service requirements of subsection (c) of that section. I mean to continue to render substantial judicial service as an Associate Justice. Yours respectfully, David Souter[19]

”

Souter's retirement gave President Barack Obama his first opportunity to nominate a Supreme Court justice. Supreme Court scholars and the media had previously speculated about whom President Obama might nominate to the court. On May 26, 2009, Obama announced his selection of federal appeals court judge Sonia Sotomayor as the nominee.

On June 29, 2009, the last day of the Court's 2008-2009 Term, Chief Justice Roberts read a letter to Souter that had been signed by all eight of his colleagues as well as retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, thanking him for his service, and Souter read a letter to his colleagues reciprocating their good wishes.^[20]

[edit] Personal life

Souter enjoys mountain climbing in New Hampshire during the judicial off-season; he waits until only a few days before the Supreme Court's session begins to return to Washington, where he lived for years in a spartan apartment.^[3] Souter was attacked by two youths in what appeared to be a random incident when jogging home at night in 2004. ^[3]

He is a former honorary co-chair of the We the People National Advisory Committee.^[21]

Once named by The Washington Post as one of Washington's 10 Most Eligible Bachelors,^[3] Justice Souter has never married, though he was once engaged.^{[citation needed]}

According to Jeffrey Toobin's book The Nine, Souter has a decidedly low-tech lifestyle. He writes with a fountain pen and does not use e-mail. According to Toobin, Souter has no cell phone, no answering machine, and no television. He prefers to drive back to New Hampshire for the summer.^[3] Souter also does his own home repairs, and spent five hours fixing his own roof in 2008.^[22]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Abraham, Henry J., Justices and Presidents: A Political History of Appointments to the Supreme Court. 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). ISBN 0-19-506557-3.
• Cushman, Clare, The Supreme Court Justices: Illustrated Biographies, 1789–1995. 2nd ed. (Supreme Court Historical Society; Congressional Quarterly Books, 2001). ISBN 1568021267, ISBN 9781568021263.
• Frank, John P., The Justices of the United States Supreme Court: Their Lives and Major Opinions (Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel, editors). (Chelsea House Publishers, 1995). ISBN 0791013774, ISBN 978-0791013779.
• Hall, Kermit L., ed. The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). ISBN 0195058356, ISBN 9780195058352.
• Martin, Fenton S., and Goehlert, Robert U., The U.S. Supreme Court: A Bibliography. (Congressional Quarterly Books, 1990). ISBN 0871875543.
• Urofsky, Melvin I., The Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary. (New York: Garland Publishing 1994). ISBN 0815311761, ISBN 978-0815311768.

[edit] External links

• Justice Souter & the First Amendment: Online Symposium
• Supreme court official bio (PDF)
• Project Vote Smart - Associate Justice David Hackett Souter profile
• NPR: Supreme Court Justice Souter To Retire by Nina Totenberg, May 3, 2009
• -The Selling of Judge David Souter to Movement Conservatives

Legal offices
Preceded by Hugh Henry Bownes	Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit 1990	Succeeded by Norman H. Stahl
Preceded by William J. Brennan	Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States 1990–2009	Succeeded by Vacant
Order of precedence in the United States of America
Preceded by Sandra Day O'Connor Retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States	United States order of precedence Retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States	Succeeded by Timothy Geithner Secretary of the Treasury

v • d • e Judicial opinions of David Souter New Hampshire Supreme Court (1983–1990); by calendar year 1980 • 1981 • 1982 • 1983 • 1984 • 1985 • 1986 • 1987 • 1988 • 1989 • 1990 U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit (1990); by calendar year 1990 Supreme Court of the United States (August 3, 1994 – present); by term 1990 • 1991 • 1992 • 1993 • 1994 • 1995 • 1996 • 1997 • 1998 • 1999 • 2000 • 2001 • 2002 • 2003 • 2004 • 2005 • 2006 • 2007 • 2008

Supreme Court of the United States

The Rehnquist Court Chief Justice: William Hubbs Rehnquist (1986–2005) 1990–1991: B. White | T. Marshall | H. Blackmun | J.P. Stevens | S.D. O'Connor | A. Scalia | A. Kennedy | D. Souter 1991–1993: B. White | H. Blackmun | J.P. Stevens | S.D. O'Connor | A. Scalia | A. Kennedy | D. Souter | C. Thomas 1993–1994: H. Blackmun | J.P. Stevens | S.D. O'Connor | A. Scalia | A. Kennedy | D. Souter | C. Thomas | R.B. Ginsburg 1994–2005: J.P. Stevens | S.D. O'Connor | A. Scalia | A. Kennedy | D. Souter | C. Thomas | R.B. Ginsburg | S. Breyer The Roberts Court Chief Justice: John Glover Roberts, Jr. (2005–present) 2005–2006: J.P. Stevens | S.D. O'Connor | A. Scalia | A. Kennedy | D. Souter | C. Thomas | R.B. Ginsburg | S. Breyer 2006–2009: J.P. Stevens | A. Scalia | A. Kennedy | D. Souter | C. Thomas | R.B. Ginsburg | S. Breyer | S. Alito

Persondata
NAME	Souter, David Hackett
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American judge
DATE OF BIRTH	September 17, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH	Melrose, Massachusetts, United States
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH