David Hackett Souter: Traditional Republican on the Rehnquist Court by Tinsley E. Yarbrough
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] he's a very private person and by most modern standards, a peculiar person. He's so solitary..."
(Nina Totenberg of the NPR, on judge Souter's nomination to the Supreme Court)

Again I succumbed to my fixation on the workings of the Supreme Court. Tinsley E. Yarbrough's David Hackett Souter, subtitled Traditional Republican on the Rehnquist Court, portrays one of the perhaps lesser known yet very interesting Supreme Court justices of the recent years. Justice Souter was nominated by George W. H. Bush in 1990 to replace the famed William Brennan, and confirmed by the Senate by an impressive 90-9 vote. The book had been written in 2005 so it does not cover the entire judicial career of Justice Souter who retired in 2009 at a relatively young age of 70 (it feels so good to write the word "young" next to the number 70!)

This a serious, technical, and a somewhat lawyerly book, addressed more for professionals rather than for legal ignoramuses like this reviewer. Of course I appreciate that the gossip factor is kept at minimum and that there is precious little sensationalism in the book. I am just warning unprepared readers that the author occasionally uses terms that need to be checked for meaning.

We read a little about Mr. Souter's youth, about him being a serious, focused student yet not completely beyond engaging in pranks. While an undergraduate at Harvard he decides to pursue a career in law rather than in theology. Then come the Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, study of law at Harvard, and 10 years in New Hampshire Attorney General office, the last two of these in the top job. Judge Souter's straight upward career path continues with the Superior Court and New Hampshire Supreme Court judgeships to culminate with the highest judicial job in the country. Still, despite the relentlessly upward slope of the trajectory, judge Souter is called a "stealth candidate" at the time of his nomination because of slim paper trail of his legal opinions on controversial issues and lack of national exposure. (Let's not forget that the voluminous paper trail and national exposure, combined with the candidate's arrogance, greatly contributed to the famous failure of judge Robert Bork's nomination.)

During the nomination process the conservatives are worrying whether judge Souter is conservative enough, liberals are worrying that the liberal wing of the Supreme Court will be severely diminished, and the press raises the candidate's "reclusive bachelor lifestyle" (wink, wink, note the pernicious and ugly euphemism 'lifestyle'), his lack of experience with "the real world" issues, and even - in a hilarious supposition - compares Mr. Souter to Chauncey the Gardener, the protagonist of Kosinski's Being There , "a strange little man [...] suddenly thrust into the whirl of American politics."

Well, despite the "stealth" nature of his candidacy, Justice Souter soon becomes one of the most important members of Supreme Court. After his first year, mainly spent as a member of the conservative majority, Justice Souter begins to display quite an independent streak and gradually, yet inexorably drifts leftward, to eventually become one of the stalwarts of the court's liberal wing, along Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer, and a principal opponent of the "originalist political philosophy" espoused for instance by Justice Scalia. In constitutional conflicts between federal and state power Justice Souter has usually taken a nationalist position. He has become "the Court's most vigorous defender of church-state separation," and has consistently condemned viewpoint discrimination and threats to free speech.

My complete ignorance of constitutional law prevents me from detailed analysis of the author's theses. Anyway, based on the author's claims the things that impress me the most about Justice Souter are that he has never shown any influence of personal beliefs on his rulings, has always tried to base his opinions on the rule of law, and has invariably kept legal precedent in deep regard. Justice Souter has not been a crusader for any cause, and that's for me the highest praise of a public servant.

Three and a half stars.

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