David Souter
David Souter
David Hackett Souteris a retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He served from October 1990 until his retirement in June 2009. Appointed by President George H. W. Bush to fill the seat vacated by William J. Brennan, Jr., Souter sat on both the Rehnquist and Roberts courts and came to vote reliably with the court's liberal members...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSupreme Court Justice
Date of Birth17 September 1939
CityMelrose, MA
CountryUnited States of America
History provides an antidote to cynicism about the past.
I am not a pessimist, but I am not an optimist about the future of American democracy.
I find the workload of what I do sufficiently great that when the term of court starts, I undergo a sort of annual intellectual lobotomy.
In a perfect world, I would never give another speech, address, talk, lecture or whatever as long as I live.
Meaning comes from the capacity to see what is not in some simple, objective sense there on the printed page.
The Brady Act was passed in response to what Congress described as an 'epidemic of gun violence.'
The day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it's going to roll over my dead body.
There is a danger to judicial independence when people have no understanding of how the judiciary fits into the constitutional scheme.
We want order and security, and we want liberty. And we want not only liberty but equality as well.
What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible.
For those whose exclusive norm of constitutional judging is merely fair reading of language applied to facts objectively viewed, 'Brown' must either be flat-out wrong or a very mystifying decision.
I would like to think that enough examples of non-compromise are going to start people thinking that there must be a better way to try to govern the country.
The first lesson, simple as it is, is that whatever court we're in, whatever we are doing, at the end of our task some human being is going to be affected. Some human life is going to be changed by what we do. And so we had better use every power of our minds and our hearts and our beings to get those rulings right.
It is impossible, maybe undesirable, to take partisanship out of the political process.