Everything about David Hackett Souter totally explained
David Hackett Souter (born
September 17,
1939) has been an
Associate Justice of the
Supreme Court of the
United States since
1990. He filled the seat vacated by
William J. Brennan. On the Court he usually votes with the liberal wing, though not as consistently as his predecessor. He currently ranks fourth in seniority among the Associate Justices.
Early life and education
Souter was born in
Melrose, Massachusetts. He is the only child of Joseph Alexander Souter and Helen Hackett Souter. His father, a banker, died in 1976. He spent most of his childhood and adolescence at his family's farm in
Weare, New Hampshire. 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.
U.S. Supreme Court
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. His old friend
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.
Later that year, President Bush nominated him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court on
July 25,
1990, (see
(External Link
)), and he took his seat on
October 9,
1990, shortly after the
United States Senate confirmed him by a vote of 90 to 9 after the
Senate Judiciary Committee reported out the nomination by a vote of 14-3. The press called him the "stealth justice" since his professional record provoked no real controversy, and provided very little paper trail.
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. A traditionalist in this regard, he famously 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." 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.
Initially, from 1990-93, he tended to be a conservative-leaning Justice, although more in the mold of
Anthony Kennedy than
Antonin Scalia or
William Rehnquist. 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. The symbolic turning point came in 1992 in
Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the Court reaffirmed the essential holding in
Roe v. Wade. Souter and Anthony Kennedy each considered overturning
Roe and upholding all the restrictions at issue in
Casey. After consulting with O'Connor, however, the three (who came to be known as the "troika") developed a joint opinion which 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.
Casey was decided by a 5 to 4 vote. Although appointed by a
Republican president, and thus expected to be conservative (see
Segal-Cover score), Souter is now considered part of the liberal wing of the Court.
After he was sworn in he said, "The first lesson, simple as it is, is that whatever court we're in, whatever we're 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'd better use every power of our minds and our hearts and our beings to get those rulings right."
Personal
Souter enjoys mountain climbing in
New Hampshire during the judicial off-season. He is co-chair of the We the People National Advisory Committee. Justice Souter isn't married, though he was once engaged.
Because he joined the Court's decision in
Kelo v. New London, some New Hampshire residents, backed primarily by the Free State project, attempted to secure an eminent domain seizure of Souter's personal residence for the
Lost Liberty Hotel.
According to Jeffrey Toobin's book
The Nine, Souter has a decidedly low-tech lifestyle. He writes with a fountain pen and doesn't use email. He has no cell phone, no answering machine, and no television.
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