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.
An only child, David was descended on his father’s side from Scottish mill workers and tradesmen who immigrated to the United States in the 1850s. On his mother’s side, he traced his lineage to the Mayflower and shared ancestors with several United States presidents, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Bushes. While he was known as Soutie to his classmates at Concord High School, during his undergraduate years at Harvard he stressed his old New England roots and sometimes called himself Hackett.
