Justice David H. Souter, who died on Thursday at 85, approached his work with care, candor and curiosity, one case at a time. He was, in other words, a justice from another era, before the unyielding theories, preening prose, celebrity memoirs and legal U-turns that can characterize the current Supreme Court.
“Justice Souter was the Supreme Court’s greatest common-law judge,” said Heather Gerken, dean of Yale Law School and one of the justice’s many and fiercely loyal former law clerks. “He possessed the humility and humanity necessary to eschew grand generalities and focus on the real problems of real people.”
Though he served until 2009, his measured prose would not have been out of place in Supreme Court decisions issued a century ago. He did not write zingers.
“He was old-school in the best possible way — respectful, engaged, unpretentious,” said Peter J. Spiro, a law professor at Temple University who was among the justice’s first law clerks.
But he could be rueful. A line from a concurring opinion from the last of his nearly 20 years on the bench sounded a little like a country music lyric, which is to say it was both simpler and more profound than what justices usually write.
“I am not through regretting,” he wrote, that one of his dissents six years before “did not carry the day. But it did not, and I agree that the precedent of that case calls for the result reached here.”
Other justices might have continued dissenting. Justice Souter accepted that he had lost and moved on to apply what was now the law.
Allison Orr Larsen, a law professor at William & Mary and a former Souter clerk, said he “believed strongly in proceeding one case at a time, letting the law evolve slowly rather than in big, bold pronouncements.”
Justice Souter was the last member of the court to forge an authentically surprising path, disappointing his Republican patrons after he was nominated by President George H.W. Bush, who expected ideological purity rather than the independence that comes with life tenure and an open-minded approach to judging.
Such expectations have also colored the court’s many encounters with the Trump administration’s maximalist legal agenda, with furious criticism from its allies at any perceived disloyalty from the court’s Republican appointees.
Several of Justice Souter’s law clerks went on to be judges, appointed by presidents of both parties. Judge Kevin Newsom, who was appointed by President Trump to the federal appeals court in Atlanta, said the justice had hired him knowing that “he and I saw law and judging differently.”
Still, Judge Newsom said, “he never wanted to hear what I thought he would think — he wanted to know, in all honesty, what I thought.”
Judge Jesse Furman, of the Federal District Court in Manhattan, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said his clerkship had changed him. “Those of us who had the privilege to spend a year with him came away better human beings for it,” Judge Furman said, “and those of us who went on to become judges ourselves are certainly better judges for it.”
Justice Souter had his habits and quirks. Lunch, for instance, was a yogurt and an apple, including the core.
“He was so old-school that it almost seemed like he never really caught up to electricity,” Professor Spiro said. “He wouldn’t turn on the lights in his office until it was pretty much dark.”
And then he would keep working, said Justice Peter J. Rubin of the Massachusetts Appeals Court, another former clerk. “He worked on weekends and late into the night, striving always to ensure that, to the best of his ability, he got things right,” Justice Rubin said.
Justice Souter was not quick to embrace change, and he was unusually adamant in his opposition to camera coverage of the Supreme Court. “The day you see a camera come into our courtroom,” he said, “it’s going to roll over my dead body.”
He hated Washington, preferring his home in New Hampshire, where he had served as the state’s attorney general and on its Supreme Court. A reporter once called the farmhouse “only slightly more seductive than a mud hut.”
He moved after he retired, apparently because his library was so vast that the house was not structurally strong enough to bear its weight.
He talked candidly about the limited pleasures of reading legal briefs rather than the history books he loved.
“I find the workload of what I do sufficiently great,” he said, “that when the term of court starts I undergo a sort of annual intellectual lobotomy.”
Justice Souter arrived at the court in 1990 as a presumptive conservative. Just two years later, he helped write a joint opinion with Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor in Planned Parenthood v. Casey reaffirming the core constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade in 1973.
More than three decades later, in 2022, the Supreme Court overturned those decisions.
Justice Souter went on to disappoint his conservative patrons in countless other cases. Indeed, had he been the conservative that Republicans were hoping for, scores of important 5-to-4 decisions during his tenure would have flipped the other way.
Over his 19 years on the court before his retirement in 2009, Justice Souter voted in a liberal direction more than two-thirds of the time in divided decisions and almost 80 percent of the time in the weightiest ones, according to data compiled by Lee Epstein, a law professor and political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis.
Professor Spiro said Justice Souter was widely misunderstood. “There was this misconception of him as a recluse,” Professor Spiro said, “but he was extremely gregarious, had a sharp sense of humor, loved his friends and colleagues. But he did not care for Washington and its trappings.”
Whatever he thought of Washington, he was fond of his colleagues, and they of him. “We understand your desire to trade white marble for White Mountains,” the justices wrote in a joint letter when he retired.
After the court issued its last opinions in 2009, he reflected on his tenure in almost poetic cadences.
“I will not sit with you at our bench after the court rises for the summer this time,” Justice Souter said, “but neither will I retire from our friendship, which has held us together despite the pull of the most passionate dissent. It has made the work lighter through all my tenure here, and for as long as I live, I will be thankful for it, and be under a very grateful obligation to each one of you.”
When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020, Justice Souter issued a statement. “I loved her to pieces,” he said.
Justice Souter was just 69 when he retired, a teenager by Supreme Court standards. (Justice Stephen G. Breyer was 83 when he retired in 2022; Justice Ginsburg was 87 when she died.)
“He left one of the most powerful positions in the world at the top of his game — simply because he thought there was more to life than being a justice on the United States Supreme Court,” Judge Newsom said. “There were, as he saw it, many mountains to hike and books to read.”
Jodi Kantor contributed reporting from New York.
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
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