David Souter – September 17, 1939

“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. His polite but persistent questioning of lawyers who appear before the court displays his meticulous preparation and his mastery of the case at hand and the cases relevant to it. Far from being out of touch with the modern world, he has simply refused to surrender to its control over aspects of his own life that give him deep contentment: hiking, sailing, time with old friends, reading history.” – Former Supreme Court Correspondent Linda Greenhouse on Souter

David Hackett Souter was born in Melrose, Massachusetts, the only child of Helen Adams (Hacket) and Joseph Alexander Souter.

On April 25, 1940, census taker Robert Francis McToyue found the Souter family living at 37 Richardson Avenue in Wakefield. Joseph was the manager of an electric store. Their home was valued at $40,000, which was tied for the highest on the page. The occupations of the neighbors varied from laundryman and secretary to chemist and doctor. Most residents were from the New England states but there were also immigrants from China, Russia, Italy, Denmark, and Canada. Canada was broken out into French Canada and English Canada.

Later life

Souter graduated from Concord High School. He was magna cum laude from Harvard with a degree in philosophy, a Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College in Oxford, and earned a law degree from Harvard Law School.

After a short time in private law, he became the assistant attorney general of New Hampshire and later attorney general. He was appointed to the Superior Court of New Hampshire and then became an Associate Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court. Under the first Bush administration, he was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

When Justice William Brennan retired from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1990, President Bush nominated Souter as his replacement. Souter was recommended by Senator Warren Rudman and Bush’s Chief of Staff John Sununu. Bush was impressed by Souter’s intellectual seriousness and his one-on-one meetings with the President. He was approved by the Senate by a 90-9 vote, despite opposition from the NAACP and the National Organization for Women, whose president predicated that Souter would “end freedom for women in this country.”

While he was expected to be a conservative justice, he eventually moved to the ideological middle and eventually voted mainly with the liberal members of the court. Ten years after his appointment, the Wall Street Journal called him a “liberal jurist”.

Details of his opinions on some major cases are here.

By 2008, Souter was looking to leave Washington and return to New Hampshire. After being assured that no other justice would be retiring after the 2009 term, he retired. President Obama appointed Sonia Sotomayor to the seat.

As a retired Supreme Court Justice, Souter is entitled to sit by designation on lower courts and has regularly sat by designation on panels of the First Circuit Court of Appeals.

Souter was once named one of Washington’s 10 Most Eligible Bachelors. He was once engaged, but never married. He was mugged in 2004 while jogging near his home. As of 2007, he had a low-tech lifestyle, including no email, cell phone, or answering machine. He currently lives in Hopkinton, New Hampshire.

Other Happenings on September 17, 1939:

• The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east.
• Poland’s leadership fled to Romania.
• The Battle of Brześć Litewski ended in German victory.
• The Battle of Changsha began in the Second Sino-Japanese War.
• The British aircraft carrier HMS Courageous was sunk off the coast of Ireland by German submarine U-29.
• Taisto Mäki becomes the first human to run 10,000m in under 30 minutes

Tomorrow – The other victim of November 22

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Sources

• Wikipedia.org
• Ancestry.com
• Onthisday.com
• Picryl.com
• Youtube.com