Washington – The retirement judge of the Supreme Court, David H. Souter, the new shy and frugal engine of the New Englander who was presented as a curator but surprised his donors of republican funds and almost everyone by becoming a liberal faithful to the high court, died, the court said in a statement on Friday. He was 85 years old.
SUBER resigned in 2009 after almost two decades in the court where he voted to maintain the laws on the financing of the campaign, environmental protection, civil rights and the separation of the State of the Church. He also played a crucial role in compliance with a woman’s right to choose abortion in 1992.
Chief judge John G. Roberts said in a statement that “the Judge SUD served our court with a great distinction for almost 20 years. He brought wisdom and kindness that is not very common to a life of public service. ”
SUBER often said that he liked the work of the court, but he did not like to live in Washington and was looking forward to going home.
“After retiring to his beloved New Hampshire in 2009, he continued to render an important service to our branch by regularly sitting at the Court of Appeal for the first circuit,” said Roberts.
As a person named by President George HW Bush, SUBER had to join the head judge of the time, William H. Rehnquist and other curators who were determined to cancel Roe v. Wade, the 1973 currency decision which widens the rights to abortion.
But when a Pennsylvania test case was presented to the court in 1992, SUVER joined the moderate judges Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Mr. Kennedy to assert the right to abortion. SUBER saw the problem as a previous question.
To repeal the constitutional right to abortion would be “an abandonment to political pressure,” he wrote. “Question under fire in the absence of the most imperative reason to re-examine a watershed decision reverses the legitimacy of the court beyond any serious question.”
This decision lasted 30 years, but in 2022, three new judges appointed by President Trump played key roles in the overthrow of constitutional right to abortion and leaving it to states to decide.
SUBER had also expressed key votes to maintain the separation of the state of the church. In 1992, he joined a 5-4 decision which confirmed the strict ban on prayers sponsored by schools during diplomas. The five judges who voted to maintain the right of abortion and the ban on school prayers were all named Republicans.
But they no longer reflected the views of a more socially conservative gop, and underground was denounced by some in the party as a turn of the turn. In the late 1990s, “No More Souters” had become a rallying cry for conservative legal activists.
“The Judge SUBER was a judicial version of a phenomenon of disappearance: the moderate republican of New England,” said Pamela Karlan, professor at Stanford Law School. “He was not a real liberal and would not have been a liberal on the court of the 1960s and the 1970s. But he believed in private life and civil rights and the previous ones, and that made him a liberal of the court of his time.”
He was unusual in other respects. Shortly after his arrival as a new justice in 1990, he was nicknamed one of the “most eligible singles” of the Washington Post, leading to a series of invitations to dinner. He usually found himself seated between a single woman and a guest who only talked about Japanese, he then joked.
SUBER has become able to refuse invitations. He would dine with judge John Paul Stevens and his wife, or with O’Connor, but above all he worked and ate alone. He spent evenings jogging along the seafront near his small apartment.
Whenever the court made a prolonged break, Underground went to the farm where he grew up to Tiny Weare, NH, so that he could hike.
He was in good health and not yet 70 when President Obama moved to the White House in early 2009. Shortly afterwards, SUBER transmitted a word that he intended to retire. Obama chose judge Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina in the High Court, to replace him.
SUBER was nicknamed “stealth nominated” when he arrived in Washington in 1990, and he remained a mystery when he left. He made no interview and made no public declaration.
Back in New Hampshire, he continued to serve part -time as a retirement judge of the 1st Court of Appeals in Boston, deciding on unleathed cases outside the public’s light.
SUBSER was not the first judge to surprise the president who appointed him, but he can be among the last. Since the time to undergo – and in fact, in part in reaction to him – the presidents carefully selected candidates for the courts with public files showing that they shared similar opinions on legal issues.
SUBER had deep ties with the Republican Party. He wore a golden watch which was a precious possession of a great-great-grandfather who attended the Convention of the Republican Party of 1860 which appointed Abraham Lincoln as president.
The GOP supported the conservation of the environment and the separation of the Church and the State when SUBER grew. But it has become more and more conservative during the decades, and SUBER does not always agree.
In July 1990, he was a 50 -year -old bachelor who lived alone on a farm with peeling painting and books on the ground. He had just been appointed to the American Court of Appeal in Boston. Until then, he had spent his entire career as a prosecutor, prosecutor and state judge in New Hampshire.
His learned way and his devotion to the law had earned him influential admirers, including then-sen. Warren Rudman and the former governor of New Hampshire, John Sununu, who was then the chief of staff to the white chamber of the first president Bush.
When the liberal chief of the Supreme Court, William J. Brennan, underwent a stroke and announced his retirement, the name of SUBER made the short list of the president’s possible candidates.
Bush was impatient to avoid a fight with the Democrats of the Senate on abortion and civil rights. The Republicans have always been stimulated by the defeat of the Senate in 1987 of judge Robert Bork, whose strongly conservative writings convinced the criticisms that he was too extreme to be confirmed.
SUBER seemed an ideal candidate. He was conservative, or at least old -fashioned. He wrote with a pen pen, not a computer. And he ignored television. He only learned Brennan who had resigned when a postal clerk in his city shared the news.
Two days later, SUVER was held in the White House press room when Bush announced his appointment. SUBER would have been “paper track”, but Sunnu assured the activists that he would be a “home run for the conservatives”.
The Liberal Democrats, led by Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, were the most sharp criticism of underground that summer, while the Senator Arch-Conservative Stromond de Caroline du Sud led the fight to confirm it. In less than two years, it has become clear that the two parties had calculated badly.
In the mid -1990s, SUVER had combined with Stevens, another moderate republican who also seemed to move to the left, and with the judges Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, the two nominees of President Clinton. They formed a liberal block in cases where the court separated along the ideological lines.
David Hackett SOURT was born in Melrose, Mass., On September 17, 1939, the only child of Joseph and Helen SOURT. His father was a banker and his mother a gift store clerk. At the age of 11, the family moved to the New Hampshire Farm House in Weare who remained the main house to undergo until retirement.
As Harvard’s first cycle, SUBER was released with a young woman and spoke of marrying her. But when he won a prestigious Rhodes scholarship and went to England to study at the University of Oxford, she found someone else.
SUBER told his friends that he was disappointed never to get married. After graduating from the Harvard Law School in 1966, he avoided the law firms in big cities and returned to the life of small cities and the rugged mountains of the New Hampshire that he loved.
Friends and former clerks say that SUBER has never been a real curator as his first donors said, and he was not a solid liberal either because he was represented years later.
SUBER was “a judge’s judge,” said Penn’s law professor Kermit Roosevelt, who grafted him in 1999. “He had no political agenda. People had an erroneous idea of what they got when he was appointed.”
