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
The obligation of any judge is to decide the case before the court, and the nature of the issue presented will largely determine the appropriate scope of the principle on which its decision should rest.
The law schools are taking a position on First Amendment grounds, and that position is in interference with military recruiting, no question about it.
The Constitution is no simple contract, not because it uses a certain amount of open-ended language, but because its language grants and guarantees many good things, and good things that compete with each other and can never all be realized, altogether, all at once.
The Constitution is a pantheon of values, and a lot of hard cases are hard because the Constitution gives no simple rule of decision for the cases in which one of the values is truly at odds with another.
The Court's majority holds that the Establishment Clause is no bar to Ohio's payment of tuition at private religious elementary and middle schools under a scheme that systematically provides tax money to support the schools' religious missions.
The court has to decide which of our approved desires has the better claim, right here, right now, and a court has to do more than read fairly when it makes this kind of choice.
The challenger has an uphill fight. If he's lucky enough to win and gets to the general election, he's going to be broke.