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supreme court memo
Retiring at just 69 after two decades on the Supreme Court, the justice left a legacy of case-by-case judging, intellectual rigor and a complete lack of pretension.
May 9, 2025Updated 2:46 p.m. ET
Justice David H. Souter, who died on Thursday at 85, approached his work with care, candor and curiosity, one case at a time. He was, in other words, a justice from another era, before the unyielding theories, preening prose, celebrity memoirs and legal U-turns that can characterize the current Supreme Court.
“Justice Souter was the Supreme Court’s greatest common-law judge,” said Heather Gerken, dean of Yale Law School and one of the justice’s many and fiercely loyal former law clerks. “He possessed the humility and humanity necessary to eschew grand generalities and focus on the real problems of real people.”
Though he served until 2009, his measured prose would not have been out of place in Supreme Court decisions issued a century ago. He did not write zingers.
“He was old-school in the best possible way — respectful, engaged, unpretentious,” said Peter J. Spiro, a law professor at Temple University who was among the justice’s first law clerks.
But he could be rueful. A line from a concurring opinion from the last of his nearly 20 years on the bench sounded a little like a country music lyric, which is to say it was both simpler and more profound than what justices usually write.
“I am not through regretting,” he wrote, that one of his dissents six years before “did not carry the day. But it did not, and I agree that the precedent of that case calls for the result reached here.”
