David H. Souter, Republican Justice Who Allied With Court’s Liberal Wing, Dies at 85

“Everyone who knew him knew that he was a sophisticated, well-read, and urbane man, hardly a hayseed from New Hampshire,” Professor Tushnet said, as he had some reason to know; his daughter, Rebecca, spent a year as one of the justice’s law clerks.

Justice Souter inspired fierce, almost protective, affection and loyalty from his friends and former clerks. Academic appraisals were less generous. His name was on so few significant opinions and his profile at the court was so low that after his first few years, legal academia essentially stopped paying attention to him. That was most likely a source of relief to the justice.

His career did inspire one biography, “David Hackett Souter: Traditional Republican on the Rehnquist Court,” in 2005. Neither Justice Souter nor any of his law clerks cooperated with the author, Tinsley E. Yarbrough, a political science professor at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. A generally admiring book, it made no pretense of getting below the surface.

If his footprints through the court’s various doctrinal fields were not particularly evident, there was no dispute about the fact that his vote mattered. Even as the court became more conservative and polarized, liberals managed to eke out some important victories, most by votes of 5 to 4, which would not have been possible had he turned out to be the justice that many conservatives assumed him to be at the time of his nomination.

A Storied Lineage

David Hackett Souter was born Sept. 17, 1939, in Melrose, Mass., where his father, Joseph, was an officer in a bank. When David was 11, the family moved from Melrose, his father’s hometown, to the farmhouse in Weare, N.H., that his mother, Helen Adams (Hackett) Souter, had inherited from her parents.