David Hackett Souter is a retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He served from October 1990 until his retirement in June 2009. Appointed by President George H. W. Bush to fill the seat vacated by William J. Brennan, Jr., Souter sat on both the Rehnquist and Roberts courts and came to vote reliably with the court's liberal members.
Background
David Hackett Souter was born on September 17, 1939, in Melrose, Massachusetts, the son of Joseph A. Souter, a banker, and Helen Hackett Souter. He spent the years of his childhood on a farm in Weare, New Hampshire, first with his maternal grandparents, who owned the farm, and later with his parents, who moved there after his grandparents died, when David was 11 years old.
Education
He attended public school in Weare and later high school in Concord, the capital of New Hampshire, located some 20 miles from Weare, where his father worked for the New Hampshire Savings Bank. After finishing high school in 1957, where he was voted by his classmates “most likely to succeed,” Souter attended Harvard University, majoring in philosophy and graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1961. From Harvard, he traveled to Oxford, England, on a Rhodes scholarship and studied jurisprudence there for two years. In 1963 he returned to the United States and studied at Harvard Law School. After receiving his law degree from Harvard, Souter moved back to New Hampshire and took a position as an associate with the Concord firm of Orr and Reno, where he engaged in a general legal practice. He did not remain long with this firm, however. By 1968 he had taken a job in the New Hampshire’s attorney general’s office as an assistant attorney general in the criminal division.
Career
Three years later Warren B. Rudman became attorney general of New Hampshire and recognized Souter’s ability by making the young lawyer his assistant. Rudman was not the only political figure to take notice ol David Souter. When Rudman left the post of attorney general in 1976, Governor Meldrin Thompson appointed Souter to become the new attorney general. After two years in this position, though, Souter received his first judicial appointment, as an associate justice on the New Hampshire Superior Court. Souter and the other judges on the Superior Court, a general trial court, traveled across die state hearing cases in the state’s various counties. As a trial judge, Souter established a reputation as a solid jurist, perhaps tougher than most on criminals, but nevertheless generally respected. After Souter had spent five years as a trial judge, New Hampshire Governor John Sununu, later President George Bush’s chief of staff, appointed him to the state’s supreme court in 1983. He served on the New Hampshire’s highest court for seven years until President George Bush appointed him to the federal judiciary in April 1990 as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
Three months after David Souter had stepped onto the federal bench, one of the Supreme Court’s leading liberal justices, William J. Brennan, Jr., retired from the Court. President George Bush’s predecessor in office, Ronald Reagan, had twice attempted to place strong conservatives on the high court toward the end of his term in office, only to have these nominations fail in the Senate. Robert Bork, after a fierce partisan debate in the Senate, had failed to secure confirmation. Subsequently, Douglas Ginsburg had also encountered stiff opposition in the Senate and had to request that his nomination be withdrawn after news surfaced that he had smoked marijuana as a law student and a law professor. President Reagan had to settle on a moderate conservative, Anthony Kennedy, for his final appointment to the Court. President Bush seemed to have learned from Reagan’s experiences, and for his first appointment to the Court, he turned to the quiet, unknown bachelor and judge from New Hampshire, David Souter.
Many observers believed at the time that the justice who replaced William Brennan on the Court might play a decisive role in the decision of key constitutional issues, not the least of which was the question of whether the Court would overrule the controversial 1970s decision that had recognized a right to abortion, Roe v. Wade (1973). Souter, though, refused to tip his hand on how he would decide abortion cases, or other cases, either to President Bush or to the Senate. Without an extensive public record on constitutional cases, either as a scholar or a judge, he was a nominee whose future performance was difficult to predict; the press therefore dubbed him the “stealth justice”. Though the Senate voted to confirm his nomination to the Supreme Court by a solid margin of 90-9, the nation waited expectantly to see what positions he would take on the Court.
Politics
Justice David Souter was appointed by President Bush to fill the seat vacated by William J. Brennan, Jr., an appointee of Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as one of the most influential justices of the 20th century. Brennan’s career as a leading liberal justice on the Court is ample evidence that presidents cannot control the careers of their appointees and sometimes cannot even correctly predict them. In this regard, Souter may well prove to be like Justice Brennan. It is too early to say whether Souter will become one of the Court’s leading liberal lights or whether his rebellion against the Court’s ascendant conservativism is merely temporary, waiting only for new appointments to restore both the Court’s ideological balance and Souter to his position in the Court’s center. But Souter has expressed a view of judging that focuses on the human consequences of each decision. Judges, he has suggested, must be aware that “at the end of our task some human being is going to be affected, some human life is going to be changed in some way by what we do.” This sympathetic reading of the judicial role sounds a note not often heard by conservative jurists, and it may well stand as evidence that the modest conser- vativism expected of Souter at the time of his appointment has transformed itself into a nascent liberalism of which Justice Brennan, his es-teemed predecessor, might be proud.
Membership
American Bar Association, N.H. Bar Association.
Connections
Once named by The Washington Post as one of Washington's 10 Most Eligible Bachelors, Souter has never married, though he was once engaged.