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
I retired when the Supreme Court rose for the summer recess in 2009, and a couple of weeks later I drove north from Washington with no regrets about the prior 19 years or about the decision to try living a more normal life for whatever time might remain.
While Congress did not, to my knowledge, calculate aggregate dollar values for the nationwide effects of racial discrimination in 1964, in 1994 it did rely on evidence of the harms caused by domestic violence and sexual assault, citing annual costs of $3 billion in 1990 and $5 to $10 billion in 1993.
Under the Articles of Confederation, the national government had the power to issue commands to the several sovereign states, but it had no authority to govern individuals directly.
Legislatures not driven to desperation by the problems of public education may be able to see the threat in vouchers negotiable in sectarian schools.
When Congress exercises the powers delegated to it by the Constitution, it may impose affirmative obligations on executive and judicial officers of state and local governments as well as ordinary citizens.
The Constitution has a good share of deliberately open-ended guarantees, like rights to due process of law, equal protection of the law, and freedom from unreasonable searches.
We hold that an employer is vicariously liable for actionable discrimination caused by a supervisor, but subject to an affirmative defense looking to the reasonableness of the employer's conduct as well as that of a plaintiff victim.
Congress has the power to legislate with regard to activity that, in the aggregate, has a substantial effect on interstate commerce.
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.
Murder has foreseeable consequences. When it happens, it is always to distinct individuals, and after it happens, other victims are left behind.