Washington – The Judge of the Supreme Court retired, David Souter, a lifetime baccalaureate who was renowned for his love of a simple life in New Hampshire and not to love Washington, died at home Thursday at the age of 85, the court said in a statement.
Taken from the relative darkness to serve the Supreme Court, SUVER has seriously disappointed the conservatives whose hope that it would be a reliable conservative vote was quickly annihilated while it was aligning with more liberal judges on questions like abortion.
“Judge David Souter served our court with a great distinction for almost twenty years. He brought wisdom and kindness unusual to a life of public service,” said Chief Justice John Roberts in a statement. “We will miss a lot.”
Appointed by President George HW Bush in 1990 to replace the Liberal judge William Brennan, SUBER was considered a stealth candidate, someone who, according to the Republicans, could be easily confirmed but would prove to be a solid curator.
Underground, little known outside of New England, was duly confirmed by the Senate during a vote of 90-9.
He quickly surprised both his supporters and his opponents by forging a path as moderate in the court which, over time, has become a solid liberal vote on issues such as abortion, death penalty and LGBTQ rights.
He was a discreet figure that avoided Washington cocktails and lived a frugal life, visiting his family home in New Hampshire as often as possible. He was known to enjoy a simple yogurt lunch and an entire apple, including the nucleus.
In some respects, one of his greatest inheritances was the impact he had on conservative legal activists, who promised to ensure that a republican president has never appointed another judge who was not correctly checked in order to ensure that the candidate would be a solid rocked curator. “No more brings” has become a rallying cry on the right.
The subsequent republican candidates have all moved the court, which now has a 6-3 conservative majority, further to the right.
The fact that SUBER is not conservative expectations became clear in 1992 when the Supreme Court considered a major challenge to abortion rights, then dedicated to law under the ROE C. Wade from 1973.
The Conservatives hoped that with a conservative majority in the court, the case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, would lead to Roe c. Wade canceled.
But instead of this, SUVER joined two other people named Republicans – judge Sandra Day O’Connor and judge Anthony Kennedy – in the preparation of a decision that confirmed what they called the “essential detention” of ROE while providing important changes to the legal test to maintain abortion restrictions.
It would take 30 years before the court, now with a more reliable conservative majority, reverses the ROE.
SUBER was also dissident with his liberal colleagues in 2000 when the Bush v Tribunal. Gore stopped the account of the vote in Florida, thus guaranteeing that the Republican candidate George W. Bush has become president.
In 2009, at the relatively young age of 69, SUBER gave up his nomination for life to return to New Hampshire. That he chose to leave the court under President Barack Obama, allowing a Democratic president to replace him, stressed how much he was perceived as a key element of the liberal block. Obama then appointed judge Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina to sit in court.
Born in the Massachusetts, SUVER has obtained undergraduate and law diplomas from Harvard and was also a Rhodes scholarship holder at the University of Oxford.
He worked as a lawyer in New Hampshire and finally became the prosecutor General of the State in 1976. Two years later, he became a state judge before being erected at the Supreme Court of New Hampshire in 1983. Before his appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States, SUBER was briefly as a judge of the Federal Court of the appeal.
