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
In a perfect world, I would never give another speech, address, talk, lecture or whatever as long as I live.
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.
Ellis Island lies in New York Harbor 1,300 feet from Jersey City, New Jersey, and one mile from the tip of Manhattan. At the time of the first European settlement, it was mostly mud, sand, and oyster shells, which nearly disappeared at high tide.
The applicability of the Establishment Clause to public funding of benefits to religious schools was settled in Everson v. Board of Ed. of Ewing, which inaugurated the modern era of establishment doctrine.
Millions of statements are made about the president every day on every subject and from every standpoint; threats of violence are not an integral feature of any one subject or viewpoint as distinct from others. Differential treatment of threats against the president, then, selects nothing but special risks, not special messages.
What I would ask and have asked ... is are we going to start seeing pressure for change in the process that feeds these people to us.
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.
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.
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.