Former Supreme Court Justice David Souter Dies

When Bush plucked Souter from obscurity in 1990, liberal interest groups feared he would be the vote that would undo the court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in favor of abortion rights. He was called a stealth nominee by some.

Bush White House aide John Sununu, the former conservative governor of New Hampshire, hailed his choice as a “home run.” And early in his time in Washington, Souter was called a moderate conservative.

But he soon joined in a ruling reaffirming woman’s right to an abortion, a decision from 1992 that is his most noted work on the court. Thirty years later, a more conservative court overturned that decision and the constitutional right to abortion.

Souter asked precise questions during argument sessions, sometimes with a fierceness that belied his low-key manner. “He had an unerring knack of finding the weakest link in your argument,” veteran Supreme Court advocate Carter Phillips said.

Souter was history’s 105th Supreme Court justice and only its sixth bachelor.

Although hailed by The Washington Post as the capital city’s most prominently eligible single man when he moved from New Hampshire, Souter resolutely resisted the social whirl.

“I wasn’t that kind of person before I moved to Washington, and, at this age, I don’t see any reason to change,” the intensely private Souter told an acquaintance.

He worked seven days a week through most of the court’s term from October to early summer, staying at his Supreme Court office for more than 12 hours a day. He said he underwent an annual “intellectual lobotomy” at the start of each term because he had so little time to read for pleasure.

Souter rented an apartment a few miles from the court and jogged alone at Fort McNair, an Army installation near his apartment building.

Souter returned to his house in Weare, New Hampshire, for a few months each summer and was given the use of an office in a Concord courthouse.

An avid hiker, Souter spent much of his time away from work trekking through the New Hampshire mountains.

Shortly after his retirement, Souter bought a 3,500-square-foot Cape Cod-style home in Hopkinton, New Hampshire. It was reported, though perhaps it was just part of Souter’s lore, that he worried that the foundation of the house in Weare would give way under the weight of all the books he owned.

Souter had been a federal appellate judge for just over four months when picked for the high court. He had heard but one case as a federal judge, and as a state judge previously had little chance to rule on constitutional issues.

Though liberals were initially wary of his appointment, it was political conservatives who felt betrayed when Souter helped forge a moderate-liberal coalition in two 1992 rulings that reaffirmed the constitutional right of abortion and the court’s longtime ban on officially sponsored prayers in public schools.

Yet as Souter biographer Tinsley Yarbrough noted, the justice did not take “extreme positions.”

Indeed, in June 2008, Souter sided with Exxon Mobil Corp. and broke with his liberal colleagues in slashing the punitive damages the company owed Alaskan victims of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Before serving as a New Hampshire judge, Souter was his state’s attorney general for two years. He worked on the attorney general’s staff the eight previous years, after a brief stint in private practice.

Souter earned his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University, and a master’s degree from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.