David Hackett Souter (/ˈsuːtər/ SOO-tər; born September 17, 1939) is an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1990 until his retirement in 2009.

[4] Appointed by President George H. W. Bush to fill the seat that had been vacated by William J. Brennan Jr., Souter sat on both the Rehnquist and the Roberts courts.

[9] He then attended Harvard University, graduating in 1961 with a Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, in philosophy and writing a senior thesis on the legal positivism of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

[11] Shortly after George H. W. Bush was sworn in as president, he nominated Souter for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

[13] Warren Rudman, who had since been elected to the U.S. Senate, and former New Hampshire Governor John H. Sununu, then Bush's chief of staff, suggested Souter, and were instrumental in his nomination and confirmation.

[14][15] At the time, few observers outside New Hampshire knew who Souter was,[16] although he had reportedly been on Reagan's short list of nominees for the Supreme Court seat held by Lewis F. Powell Jr. that eventually went to Anthony Kennedy.

[17] Souter was seen as a "stealth justice" whose professional record in the state courts provoked no real controversy and provided a minimal "paper trail"[18] on issues of U.S.

Bush saw the lack of a paper trail as an asset, because one of President Reagan's nominees, Robert Bork, had been rejected by the Senate partially because of his extensive written opinions on controversial issues.

[31] In his testimony before the Senate, he was thought by conservatives to be a strict constructionist on constitutional matters, but he portrayed himself as an incrementalist who disliked drastic change and attached a high importance to precedent.

[16] In the 1992 case Lee v. Weisman, Souter voted with the liberal wing and against allowing prayer at a high school graduation ceremony.

[34] In the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Souter voted with the moderate wing in a majority decision in which the Court reaffirmed the essential holding in Roe v. Wade but narrowed its scope.

After consulting with O'Connor, the three (who came to be known as the "troika") developed a joint opinion that upheld all the restrictions in Casey except the mandatory notification of a husband while asserting the essential holding of Roe, that the Constitution protects the right to an abortion.

[39] For example, after widespread speculation that President George W. Bush intended to appoint Alberto Gonzales—whose perceived views on affirmative action and abortion drew criticism—to the Court, some conservative Senate staffers popularized the slogan "Gonzales is Spanish for Souter".

Souter is widely believed to have written the section of the opinion that addresses the issue of stare decisis and set out a four-part test in determining whether to overrule a prior decision.

In 1995, a series of articles based on his written opinions and titled "Souter Court" was published by a Moscow legal journal, The Russian Justice.

[44] Justice of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation Yury Danilov, reviewing the 2nd edition of the book in a Moscow English-language daily, made the following remark on Souter's position in Bush v. Gore: "In a most critical and delicate situation, David Souter had maintained the independence of his position and in this respect had become a symbol of the independence of the judiciary.

[47][48] The election of a Democratic president in 2008 may have made Souter more inclined to retire, but he did not want to create a situation in which there would be multiple vacancies at once.

[51] Later that day Obama made an unscheduled appearance during the daily White House press briefing to announce Souter's retirement.

In one exception, comments he made during a 2012 appearance at the Capitol Center for the Arts in New Hampshire about the dangers of "civic ignorance" were, in 2016, called "remarkably prescient" of the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

[63] According to Jeffrey Toobin's 2007 book The Nine, Souter has a decidedly low-tech lifestyle: He writes with a fountain pen, does not use email, and has no cellphone or answering machine.

[65] Former Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse wrote of Souter: "to focus on his eccentricities—his daily lunch of yogurt and an apple, core and all; the absence of a computer in his personal office—is to miss the essence of a man who in fact is perfectly suited to his job, just not to its trappings.

Far from being out of touch with the modern world, he has simply refused to surrender to it control over aspects of his own life that give him deep contentment: hiking, sailing, time with old friends, reading history.

Souter told a disappointed Weare neighbor that the two-story family farmhouse was not structurally sound enough to support the thousands of books he owns and that he wished to live on one level.