Supreme Court docket justices are well-known however not well-known. Their names are acquainted however not their faces. Because of this, David Souter and Stephen Breyer have been continuously mistaken for one another. As soon as throughout his tenure on the court docket, Souter was driving from Washington to his dwelling in New Hampshire, and he stopped in somewhat restaurant to get one thing to eat. A pair got here as much as him, and the person requested him a query.
“You’re on the Supreme Court docket, proper?” Souter nodded. “You’re Stephen Breyer, proper?”
Souter didn’t need to embarrass the guy in entrance of his spouse, so he mentioned sure, he was Breyer. They chatted for a short time, and the guy requested, “Justice Breyer, what’s the perfect factor about being on the Supreme Court docket?”
After a pause, the justice answered, “I’d should say it was the privilege of serving with David Souter.”
Souter, who died Friday at 85, was at all times among the many extra obscure members of the court docket, and few knew of his laconic good humor. His biography was usually shortened to a handful of info. New Englander. Bachelor (regardless of the ardent efforts of Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg to repair him up through the years). Republican appointee however disappointment to conservatives. He hated Washington, D.C., and retired at simply 69 years outdated in 2009, turning his seat over to President Barack Obama, who changed him with Sonia Sotomayor.
However there was much more to Souter than these snippets counsel. At a second when the Supreme Court docket, just like the nation as an entire, is locked into opposing partisan camps, he was an unapologetic learner. In his first time period on the court docket, in 1991, he was a doctrinaire conservative, even voting with the bulk to uphold the so-called gag rule, which restricted medical staff at federally funded services from discussing abortion with sufferers.
However in the summertime after that first time period, he informed his colleague Harry Blackmun in a letter that he wanted to return to New Hampshire to be alone. “I’ve wished as a lot as attainable to be alone to come back to phrases in my very own coronary heart with what has been taking place to me,” he wrote.
What occurred is that Souter became a humane and distinguished justice, who had a larger scope of imaginative and prescient than his background advised. He was proudly old style. He was given a tv however by no means plugged it in. He wrote with a fountain pen. He didn’t like electrical mild. (He moved his workplace chair round his chambers to catch the daylight via the home windows.)
But it was Souter, of all folks, who wrote the court docket’s broadly heralded opinion defending the correct of the rap group 2 Stay Crew to have interaction in parody and sampling of authentic music with out violating the Copyright Act. He had the breadth of imaginative and prescient to see what was at stake, and that utilized to far more than music. Together with O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, Souter engineered the compromise that preserved the correct to abortion within the Casey determination of 1992. He dissented in Bush v. Gore. He voted to ensure the correct to due strategy of the prisoners in Guantánamo.
There was a time when average and even liberal Republicans like Souter held nice sway on the court docket. There was John Marshall Harlan II within the Nineteen Fifties, Potter Stewart within the ’60s and, in later years, Lewis Powell and John Paul Stevens, together with Blackmun, O’Connor and Kennedy, in addition to Souter. That sort of average is gone now — gone from the Supreme Court docket and, it seems, the floor of the earth. Sadly, Souter’s sensible jurisprudence disappeared lengthy earlier than the person himself left us.
