The Nine [23]
At first, Souter’s eccentricities drew more notice around the Court than his jurisprudence. Fifty-two years old and a lifelong bachelor, he had the habits of a gentleman from another century. During the day, he would leave the lights off in his office and maneuver his chair around the room, reading briefs by the sun. He ate the same thing for lunch every day: an entire apple, including the core and seeds, with a cup of yogurt. When the justices sat together in their dining room, the two items would be delivered to Souter on the same fine china that served his colleagues; Souter was familiar with Coca-Cola, but he had never heard of a beverage that several of the other justices favored—Diet Coke. Souter did all his writing by fountain pen. Perhaps the best-known fact about the new justice was that when Warren Rudman, the New Hampshire senator who was Souter’s friend and patron, gave Souter his first television set, he apparently never plugged it in. By the end of Souter’s first term, there was some sentiment around the Court that he was overwhelmed by his new job. Souter almost said as much in his customary first interview with the Court’s in-house publication, the Docket Sheet. “I really see myself less as working than as trying to keep from being inundated by the flow of things to be done,” he said. “Somebody used the phrase that coming here is like walking through a tidal wave, and it is.”
When the term ended in June 1991, Souter did not so much leave Washington as flee. He returned to the converted farmhouse in Weare, New Hampshire, that had been his grandparents’ home and where he had grown up. (Contrary to rumor, Souter did not live with his mother; she had moved elsewhere.) The swirl of events leading to his appointment had deprived him of the time to think about the magnitude of the task before him. In a letter declining an invitation from Blackmun to join him on his annual summer trip to Aspen, Souter wrote, “I have wanted as much as possible to be alone to come to terms in my own heart with what has been happening to me…. I have also felt the need to engage in some reading and thinking about matters that will be coming before the Court.” He wanted his summers, he wrote later, “wholly free for…self-education. I need some period of the year when I can make a close approach to solitude.”
When Souter returned the following fall for his second term—the year of Casey—it became clear both that he had been underestimated in Washington and that he brought a distinctive judicial philosophy to the bench. For most of the twentieth century, the political left and right had their clear judicial analogues on the Supreme Court. In rough terms, William Brennan and his allies used the Constitution as a vehicle for liberal change—to build a society with greater freedom and equality. On the other side, Rehnquist and Scalia generally put forth the view that courts should defer to political majorities and legislators and interpret the Constitution in line with the original intent of the framers. There was, however, a third tradition in American law, which was less familiar to the public because, unlike the others, it did not neatly reflect the division between the Democratic and Republican parties. But it was to this third tradition that David Souter belonged.
At his confirmation hearings in 1990, Souter made his affiliation plain. At the time, Souter was widely regarded as