Here Are Some Fun David Souter Stories That Didn’t Make the Cut
An important lesson about eating apples the right way.
Justice David Souter, who retired from the Supreme Court in 2009 after a 19-year career of making conservatives upset, died on Thursday at age 85. I wrote about his life here, but as is always the case with obituaries, there are lots of details I couldn’t fit into the story. Most of them are about how delightfully odd Souter was, even in Supreme Court justice-adjusted terms. In his book The Nine, for example, Jeffrey Toobin revealed that after Chief Justice William Rehnquist died in 2004, Souter missed the ceremonial procession of Rehnquist’s casket because he was back home in New Hampshire at the time, and since he had a phone at the house, but no answering machine, fax, email address, or cell phone, no one could get ahold of him.
Other choice tidbits from The Nine, which is, for my money, the best book about the Supreme Court authored by someone whose Wikipedia page includes a section titled “Zoom masturbation incident”: Rather than turn on the lights in his office, Souter usually read by sunlight, moving his chair around the room in order to see better. A lifelong bachelor, Souter once ended a blind date that seemed to be going well by telling his dinner companion, “Let’s do this again next year.” For lunch, he ate the same thing every day: yogurt and a whole apple, including the core. (This is also how I eat apples, but I’m not out here claiming to be normal or anything.)
Probably the best anecdotes, one of which is making the rounds on social media, are about the recurring phenomenon of people mixing up Souter and Justice Stephen Breyer, who, apart from being older white guys who occasionally wore glasses, did not really look alike. Sometimes, even people who should have known better made this mistake: At oral argument in Bush v. Gore, when Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris’s lawyer referred to Souter as “Justice Breyer,” Souter interrupted oral argument in the Court’s most important case in decades for an important clarification. “I’m Justice Souter,” he said. “You’ve got to cut that out.”
The most important reason to remember Souter, of course, is that he understood how important it was to be a responsible steward of power, and stepped down to ensure his seat would remain in liberal hands long after he’d left the bench. But in my view, it is also very cool that he went his entire life without doomscrolling, and never left a disgusting apple core to brown on the plate.
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