Retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter dead at age 85

Justice David Souter, a quiet and iconoclastic jurist who spent nearly two decades on the United States Supreme Court from 1990 to 2009, has died at age 85.

The New Hampshire-born attorney was named to the highest court in the U.S. by then-president George H.W. Bush, who sought a conservative replacement for Justice William Brennan, an icon of the court’s liberal wing. But Souter’s time on the court revealed him to be more pragmatic than ideological as he shifted to the center, often voting with the court’s liberals in abortion-related cases that made him a pariah in right-wing legal circles.

In a statement, Chief Justice John Roberts praised his late colleague as having “served our Court with great distinction for nearly twenty years” and said the Granite State resident had “brought uncommon wisdom and kindness to a lifetime of public service.”

Roberts also praised Souter for spending roughly 10 years of retirement as a part-time judge on the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and said his former colleague would be “greatly missed.”

David Hackett Souter was born on September 17, 1939 in the town of Melrose, Massachusetts but spent the vast majority of his childhood — and his life — on his family’s farm in Weare, New Hampshire.

After attending New Hampshire public schools, he matriculated at Harvard University and earned a bachelor’s degree there in 1961 before accepting a Rhodes Scholarship that took him to Magdalen College, Oxford. There, he earned an A.B. in Jurisprudence and a Master’s degree in two years, after which he returned to Harvard Law School for a three-year period of study to earn a Bachelor of Laws.

Souter was admitted to the bar and began practicing law at the Concord, New Hampshire firm of Orr and Reno as an associate attorney. But he turned to public service in 1968 when he accepted a job as an Assistant Attorney General of the Granite State. Three years later, he was New Hampshire’s Deputy Attorney General, and by 1978 he was the Attorney General of New Hampshire, the state’s chief law enforcement officer.

His meteoric rise through the profession continued when he was selected to be an Associate Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court in 1978. He would spend the next 12 years on that court, including the last seven as Chief Justice, before then-president George H.W. Bush nominated him to serve on the First Circuit. He took his seat on the Boston-based court in May 1990.

But Souter did not remain in Boston for long. Brennan, the outspoken liberal who’d been a stalwart of the high court since 1956, suffered a stroke and announced his retirement from public service.

Bush, whose close friend and chief of staff John Sununu had selected Souter to be a justice on New Hampshire’s top court during his time as governor, successfully advocated for him to be elevated to the nation’s highest court as a replacement for Brennan with the aim of tilting the court’s ideological balance to the political right.

After a confirmation hearing, the United States Senate voted to confirm Souter as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Court by a vote of 90 in favor and just nine against, leading to him being sworn in to office on October 9, 1990.

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