David Souter

David Hackett Souter (born September 17, 1939) is an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1990 until his retirement in 2009.

Appointed by President George H. W. Bush to fill the seat that had been vacated by William J. Brennan Jr., Souter sat on both the Rehnquist and the Roberts courts.

Raised in New England, Souter attended Harvard College, Magdalen College, Oxford, and Harvard Law School.

After briefly working in private practice, he moved to public service.

Souter was born in Melrose, Massachusetts, on September 17, 1939, the only child of Joseph Alexander Souter (1904–1976) and Helen Adams (Hackett) Souter (1907–1995).

His father was of Scottish ancestry and his mother of English ancestry.

At age 11, he moved with his family to their farm in Weare, New Hampshire.

Souter graduated second in his class from Concord High School in 1957.

He then attended Harvard University, graduating in 1961 with an Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, in philosophy and writing a senior thesis on the legal positivism of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. While at Harvard, Souter was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

He was selected as a Rhodes Scholar and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree (later promoted to a Master of Arts degree, as per tradition) in Jurisprudence from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1963.

He served as a prosecutor (1966–1968) in the New Hampshire Attorney General's office (1968–1976), as the attorney general of New Hampshire (1976–1978), as an associate justice of the Superior Court of New Hampshire (1978–1983), as an associate justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court (1983–1990), and briefly as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit (1990).

Souter was nominated to the Supreme Court without a significant "paper trail" but was expected to be a conservative justice.

Within a few years of his appointment, Souter moved towards the ideological center.

He eventually came to vote reliably with the Court's liberal wing.

He graduated in 1966 with a Bachelor of Laws degree from Harvard Law School.

In 1968, after two years as an associate at the law firm of Orr & Reno in Concord, New Hampshire, Souter realized he disliked private practice and began his career in public service by accepting a position as an Assistant Attorney General of New Hampshire.

As Assistant Attorney General he prosecuted criminal cases in the courts.

In 1971, Warren Rudman, then the Attorney General of New Hampshire, selected Souter to be the Deputy Attorney General.

Souter succeeded Rudman as New Hampshire Attorney General in 1976.

In 1978, with the support of his friend Rudman, Souter was named an associate justice of the Superior Court of New Hampshire.

As a judge on the Superior Court he heard cases in two counties and was noted for his tough sentencing.

With four years of trial court experience, Souter was appointed to the New Hampshire Supreme Court as an associate justice in 1983.

Shortly after George H. W. Bush was sworn in as President, he nominated Souter for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Souter had had seven years of judicial experience at the appellate level, four years at the trial court level, and ten years with the Attorney General's office.

He was confirmed by unanimous consent of the Senate on April 27, 1990.

President George H. W. Bush originally considered nominating Clarence Thomas to Brennan's seat, but he and his advisers decided that Thomas did not yet have enough experience as a judge.

Warren Rudman, who had since been elected to the U.S. Senate, and former New Hampshire Governor John H. Sununu, then Bush's chief of staff, suggested Souter, and were instrumental in his nomination and confirmation.

Bush was reportedly "highly impressed by Souter's intellectual seriousness" and Souter's intellect, "particularly impressive in one-on-one meetings", was reported to have been a persuasive factor in his nomination.

At the time, few observers outside New Hampshire knew who Souter was, although he had reportedly been on Reagan's short list of nominees for the Supreme Court seat held by Lewis F. Powell Jr. that eventually went to Anthony Kennedy.

Souter was seen as a "stealth justice" whose professional record in the state courts provoked no real controversy and provided a minimal "paper trail" on issues of U.S. Constitutional law.

Bush saw the lack of a paper trail as an asset, because one of President Reagan's nominees, Robert Bork, had been rejected by the Senate partially because of his extensive written opinions on controversial issues.

Bush nominated Souter on July 25, 1990, saying that he did not know Souter's stances on abortion, affirmative action, or other issues.

Senate confirmation hearings were held beginning on September 13, 1990.

The National Organization for Women opposed Souter's nomination and held a rally outside the Senate during his confirmation hearings.

The president of NOW, Molly Yard, testified that Souter would "end freedom for women in this country."

Souter was also opposed by the NAACP, which urged its 500,000 members to write letters to their senators asking them to oppose the nomination.

In Souter's opening statement before the Judiciary Committee of the Senate he summed up the lessons he had learned as a judge of the New Hampshire courts:

"The first lesson, simple as it is, is that whatever court we are in, whatever we are doing, whether we are in a trial court or an appellate court, at the end of our task some human being is going to be affected. Some human life is going to be changed in some way by what we do, whether we do it as trial judges or whether we do it as appellate judges, as far removed from the trial arena as it is possible to be. And so we had better use every power of our minds and our hearts and our beings to get those rulings right."

In mid-2009, after Democrat Barack Obama took office as U.S. president, Souter announced his retirement from the Court; he was succeeded by Sonia Sotomayor.

Souter has continued to hear cases by designation at the circuit court level.