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David Hackett Souter (born September 17, 1939) has been an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court since 1990. He filled the seat vacated by William J. Brennan. On the Court he often votes with the liberal wing, though not as consistently as his predecessor.
Early life
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.
Education
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 chose to attend Magdalen College, Oxford, where he received an B.A. in Jurisprudence from Oxford University and an M.A. in 1963. He then entered Harvard Law School, graduating in 1966.
After law school he worked as an associate at Orr and Reno in Concord, New Hampshire from 1966 to 1968. But 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.
U.S. Supreme Court
In 1976, Rudman resigned to enter private practice 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, and was appointed to the New Hampshire Supreme Court as an Associate Justice in 1983. He 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, as well as former New Hampshire governor John H. Sununu and then chief of staff to President George H.W. Bush were instrumental in both his appointment 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 *), and he took his seat on October 9, 1990, shortly after the United States Senate confirmed him by a vote of 90 to 9. 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 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 Justice, although much in the mold of Anthony Kennedy, rather 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. Roe was decided by a 7 to 2 vote, though Casey was 5 to 4.
Although appointed by a Republican president, and thus expected to be conservative (see Segal-Cover score), he is associated with the liberal wing of the Court. He dissented from the conservative majority in Bush v. Gore election of 2000.
After he 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."
Personal
On April 30, 2004, Souter suffered minor injuries when some young men assaulted him as he jogged on a city street in Washington, D.C.. The attempted robbery failed and the suspects were never found.
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 is not married, though he was once engaged.
Souter's personal residence was half-jokingly targeted with the idea of the Lost Liberty Hotel.
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