Word: souter
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Souter had been a federal appeals court judge in Boston for just three months when Bush plucked him out of relative obscurity. Before that he had spent seven years on the New Hampshire state supreme court and 10 in the state attorney general's office. Neither job gave him much opportunity to set down his views on divisive issues like abortion rights, affirmative action and gun control. When Justice Thurgood Marshall, another of the court liberals, was asked what he knew about Souter, all he could say was: "Never heard...
...Souter's very lack of a firm ideological profile that appealed to Bush. Three years earlier liberal activist groups had derailed the court nomination of the indisputably conservative Robert Bork. If Souter didn't have a long paper trail of court rulings, law review articles and books, it would be much harder for liberals to stage a replay of the Bork defeat. (Read the TIME 100: The World's Most Influential People...
...immediate aftermath of his nomination, the search was on for clues to the "real" David Souter. And everyone came up with the same opaque portrait: he was a solitary man, given to serious reading - Shakespeare, Dickens, Proust - and mountain trail hiking. Since the age of 11 he had lived in the same rundown farmhouse near Concord, N.H. Still unmarried at age 50, there was no evidence he was gay - something plenty of people on both sides of the divide investigated as soon as he was nominated...
...What Souter did have were unquestionable intellectual chops. He majored in philosophy and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard. Then came the Rhodes scholarship that took him to Oxford and the Harvard law degree that quickly brought him a job with a New Hampshire law firm. But Souter was restless in private practice. By 1968 he had joined the staff of the state attorney general's office. When Warren Rudman became attorney general two years later he tapped Souter as his chief aide, and when Rudman moved on to the U.S. Senate in 1976 he persuaded...
...Souter served as attorney general for two years before moving on to the state's highest court, where he would leave behind a record in which liberals and conservatives could both find encouraging signs. He was a strong supporter of environmental and consumer protections. But in criminal cases he tended to favor the prosecution. And in a 1986 dissent he adopted the "strict constructionist" argument that a court's job was to determine how constitutional language was understood by the framers who proposed it. When it came time for Souter's name to go before the U.S. Senate, the first...