David H. Souter was a Republican Justice who allied with the liberal wing of the court

David D. Souter, a Newly-Retired Judicial Justice and the First Law in the Constitution of the United States

The court announced Friday that David Souter, who became a Justice on the Supreme Court in 1990 but surprised Republicans by joining the liberal wing, has died. He was no longer alive.

He has told his friends over the years that he wants to retire but he didn’t want to have a new President to fill it. He sent his retirement letter to the President in May 2009, a few months after he took office.

He was a retired justice and sat for several weeks with his old court in Boston every year. He kept chambers there and in Concord, N.H. He was recruited by Justice O Connor to serve on a commission to improve civics education in New Hampshire, and it was a cause he devoted himself to for the rest of his life. He gave his papers to the New Hampshire Historical Society with a condition: they would not be open for 50 years after his death.

He gave a speech that was sober and very touching when he received an degree from his alma mater, Harvard. He said that the idea of all of constitutional law being in the Constitution waiting for a judge to read it was simplistic. He said that the approach doesn’t make sense.

A Conversation With John Souter About the New Hampshire Supreme Court: An Insight From a Conservative Lawyer Who Never Thought to Leave Washington

He lived in a spartan apartment that was close to the Supreme Court offices on Capitol Hill, but he wasn’t a creature of the city’s social scene. Although he served nearly two decades on the high court, he made no secret of his preference for the lifestyle and pace of his native rural New Hampshire.

Instead of flying, Souter preferred to drive. He used a fountain pen and wrote his opinions and dissents in longhand, despite the fact that he resisted other forms of modern technology.

At the time of his retirement, Souter was 69 and nowhere near the oldest member of the court. But he had made clear to friends at the time that he wanted to leave Washington, a city he never liked, and return to his native New Hampshire.

Souter was educated at Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He also attended Oxford University’s college. But his academic pedigree was only one reason he had been regarded as a thinking man’s jurist and a highly thoughtful conservative prior to his elevation to the nation’s highest bench.

Once appointed and confirmed, he soon became a “surprise justice.” He bucked the expectation that he would join the court’s conservative wing — then led by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who was appointed to the court by President Richard Nixon and elevated to chief by President Ronald Reagan, and featuring Reagan appointees Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy.

John Sununu, who was the White House chief of staff at the time, had known that Souter was a conservative member of the New Hampshire Supreme Court.

The court’s more moderate wing, which also included Reagan appointees, surprised both Sununu and Bush when they saw that the judge was aligning himself with them.