David Souter

David Souter

David Hackett Souter ( SOO-t?r; born September 17, 1939) is a retired associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He served from October 1990 to his retirement in June 2009. Appointed by US President George H. W. Bush to fill the seat that had been vacated by William J. Brennan Jr., Souter sat on both the Rehnquist and the Roberts Courts. Souter grew up in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and attended Harvard College; Magdalen College, Oxford; and Harvard Law School. After briefly working in private practice, he moved to public service. He served as a prosecutor (1966–1968), in the New Hampshire Attorney General's office (1968–1976), as the attorney general of New Hampshire (1976–1978), as an associate justice of the Superior Court of New Hampshire (1978–1983), as an associate justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court (1983–1990) and briefly as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit (1990).Souter was nominated to the Supreme Court without a significant "paper trail", but was expected to be a conservative justice. Within a few years of his appointment, Souter moved towards the ideological center. He eventually came to vote reliably with the Court's liberal wing.In mid-2009, after Democrat Barack Obama took office as U.S. president, Souter announced his retirement from the Court. He was succeeded by Sonia Sotomayor. Souter has continued to hear cases by designation at the circuit court level.

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