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Justice David H. Souter, who died on Thursday at the age of 85, approached his work with care, frankness and curiosity, one case at a time. In other words, he was a justice from a different era, before the unyielding theories, smoothing prose, celebrity memoirs and legal U-turns that can characterize the current Supreme Court.
“Justice Souter was the biggest Common Law Judge of the Supreme Court,” said Heather Gerkers, dean of Yale Law School and one of the many and fiercely loyal former legal clerks of justice. “He owned the humility and humanity that is needed to shy away from great generalities and to concentrate on the real problems of real people.”
Although he served until 2009, his measured prose would not have been out of place in decisions of the Supreme Court that were published a century ago. He wrote no Zingers.
“He was old-school in the best possible way respectful, involved, unpretentious,” said Peter J. Spiro, professor of law at Temple University that was part of the first legislation of the judiciary.
But he could be sad. A line of A simultaneous opinion From the last of his almost 20 years on the couch sounded a bit like a lyric with a country music, meaning that it was both simpler and in -depth than what judges usually write.
“I am not sorry,” he writtenThat one of his different opinions “did not wear the day six years earlier. But it didn’t, and I agree that the precedent of that case calls the result that has been achieved here.”
Other judges may be a deviation from the balance. Justice Souter accepted that he had lost and continued to apply what the law was now.
Allison Orr Larsen, Professor of Law at William & Mary and a former basic assistant, said that he “strongly believed in the continuation of one case at the same time, so that the law slowly evolved instead of in large, bold statements.”
Justice Souter was the last member of the court to forge an authentic surprising path and disappointed his Republican customers after he was nominated by President George HW Bush, who expected ideological purity instead of the independence accompanied by a term and a open -minded approach to assess.
Such expectations have also colored the many encounters of the court with the maximum legal agenda of the Trump government, with furious criticism from his allies on every observed unfaithfulness of the Republican institute of the court.
Various Justice Griffiers from Justice Souter were judges, appointed by presidents of both parties. Judge Kevin Newsom, who was appointed by President Trump as the Federal Court of Appeal in Atlanta, said that the righteousness had hired him knowing that “he and I saw the law and judge otherwise.”
Yet Judge Newsom said: “He never wanted to hear what I thought he would think – he wanted to know what I thought in all honesty.”
Judge Jesse Furman, of the federal court in Manhattan, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said his internship had changed him. “Those of us who had the privilege to spend a year with him, better people came for it,” said Judge Furman, “and those of us who became judges themselves are certainly better judges for it.”
Justice Souter had his habits and oddities. Lunch, for example, was a yogurt and an apple, including the core.
“He was so old school that it almost seemed like he never really overtaken electricity,” said Professor Spiro. “He would not switch on the lights in his office until it was almost dark.”
And then he would continue to work, said Justice Peter J. Rubin of the Massachusetts Appeals Court, another former clerk. “He worked during the weekend and see you at night and always strive to ensure that he has things right to the best of its ability,” said Justice Rubin.
Justice Souter was not quick to embrace change, and he was unknown in his opposition against camera leadership of the Supreme Court. “The day you see a camera coming into our courtroom,” he said, “it’s about rolling my dead body.”
He hated Washington and preferred his house in New Hampshire, where he had served the Attorney General of the State and the Supreme Court. A reporter ever called The farm “only slightly more tempting than a mud hut.”
He moved after he retired, apparently because his library was so huge that the house Was not structurally strong enough to carry his weight.
He spoke frankly about the limited pleasures of reading legal instructions instead of the history books he loved.
“I think the workload of what I am doing enough,” he said, “that when the court period starts, I have a kind of annual intellectual lobotomy.”
Justice Souter arrived in 1990 on the field as a presumably conservative. Only two years later he helped one joint opinion With Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor in Planned Parenthood v. Casey confirms the core consistent right to abortion that has been established in Roe v. Wade In 1973.
More than three decades later, in 2022, the Supreme Court destroyed those decisions.
Justice Souter disappointed his conservative customers in countless other things. Indeed, if he had been the conservative that Republicans hoped for, dozens of important 5-to-4 decisions would have turned in the other way during his term of office.
During his 19 years at the Court before his retirement in 2009, Justice Souter voted more than two -thirds of the time in divided decisions and almost 80 percent of the time in the toughest, according to data collected by Lee Epstein, a professor and political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis.
Professor Spiro said that Justice was outer outerly understood. “There was a misconception of him as a hermit,” said Professor Spiro, “but he was extremely Gregarious, had a sharp sense of humor, loved his friends and colleagues. But he didn’t care about Washington and his attributes.”
Whatever he thought of Washington, he loved his colleagues and she from him. “We understand your desire to exchange white marble for white mountains,” the judges registered A joint letter When he retired.
After the court had given his last opinions in 2009, he thought about his term of office in almost poetic cadence.
“I will not be sitting with you on our bank after the court comes up before the summer this time,” said Justice Souter, “but I will also not retire from our friendship, who kept us together despite the attraction of the most passionate deviating opinions. It is lighter by all my term of office here, and as long as I live, I will be grateful for a very grateful obligations.”
When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020, Justice Souter issued a statement. “I loved her in pieces,” he said.
Justice Souter was only 69 when he retired, a teenager according to standards of the Supreme Court. (Justice Stephen G. Breyer was 83 when he retired in 2022; Justice Ginsburg was 87 when she died.)
“He left one of the most powerful positions in the world at the top of his game – simply because he thought there was more in life than a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States,” said Judge Newsom. “There were, as he saw it, many mountains for walking and books to read.”
Jodi Kantor Contribute to reporting from New York.
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