Justice David Souter
Today’s Justice of the Day is: DAVID SOUTER. Justice Souter took the Judicial Oath to officially join the Supreme Court of the United States on this day, October 9, in 1990.
Justice Souter was born in 1939 in Melrose, Massachusetts, but moved with his family at the age of eleven to New Hampshire, the state where he would remain for virtually all of his life and from which he would be appointed to the SCUS. He was a star student even in his early years, and made it to Harvard College, which he graduated from with a B.A. in 1961. Justice Souter then moved on to attend the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, earning a B.A. and an M.A. in 1963, before returning to the U.S. to attend Harvard Law School, which he left with an LL.B. in 1966.
Immediately upon graduation, Justice Souter entered private practice in Concord, New Hampshire, but ceased his work as a private attorney two years later when he became an Assistant Attorney General of the State of New Hampshire. He left that position in 1971, when he began a five-year term as Deputy Attorney General of the State of New Hampshire, after which he served as his home state’s Attorney General for two years. In 1978, Justice Souter became an Associate Justice of the Superior Court of New Hampshire, before becoming an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of New Hampshire five years later. Justice Souter began his service on the federal bench when he was appointed to serve on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in 1990, about five months before his elevation to the SCUS.
Justice Souter was nominated by President George H.W. Bush on July 25, 1990, to a seat vacated by Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on October 2, and received his commission the following day. Justice Souter served on the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts, and he assumed senior status on June 30, 2009.
Justice Souter is perhaps most famous today for the role that he played in saving the SCUS’s liberal wing from total defeat during the heyday of Rehnquist Court conservatism. There was a brief moment in the early-1990’s when it seemed that the replacement of Justices Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, the SCUS’s liberal titans at the time, with Republican appointees had cleared the way for conservative dominance like nothing the nation had seen since the 1920’s. A major reason that this did not come to pass was Justice Souter’s split with the SCUS’s right-leaning Members, an event that can be traced to two cases in particular: Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) and Bush v. Gore (2000). The former saw him, in concert with Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy, save the constitutional protections afforded to women seeking abortions from being overruled. The latter’s resolution seemed to strike Justice Souter as an unprecedented misuse of the judiciary’s power to serve political ends, and made his move to the left permanent. By that time, and for the duration of his tenure, he started voting with Justice John Paul Stevens, the intellectual leader of the SCUS’s liberals, far more than with even the moderate, Republican-appointed Justices O’Connor and Kennedy. Perhaps Justice Souter’s most enduring legacy, much like Justice Harry Blackmun’s, will be in having helped prevent the rise of a 6-to-3 conservative-leaning balance on the SCUS which would almost certainly have short-circuited the few victories that liberals have managed to secure from the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts (like saving the right to choose, for one, or expanding LGBT protections, for another).