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
Every defendant knows, if endowed with the mental competence for criminal responsibility, that the life he will take by his homicidal behavior is that of a unique person, like himself, and that the person to be killed probably has close associates, 'survivors,' who will suffer harms and deprivations from the victim's death.
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.
If speech always wins, even if it's an atomic secret that's going to be broadcast to our enemies, it's easy to make a decision. Speech always wins. But it doesn't... Liberty doesn't always trump equality or equality always trump liberty.
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.
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.
What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible.
We want order and security, and we want liberty. And we want not only liberty but equality as well.
There is a danger to judicial independence when people have no understanding of how the judiciary fits into the constitutional scheme.
The day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it's going to roll over my dead body.
The Brady Act was passed in response to what Congress described as an 'epidemic of gun violence.'
Murder has foreseeable consequences. When it happens, it is always to distinct individuals, and after it happens, other victims are left behind.
Meaning comes from the capacity to see what is not in some simple, objective sense there on the printed page.
In a perfect world, I would never give another speech, address, talk, lecture or whatever as long as I live.
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.