Former Supreme Court Justice David Souter dies at 85

The retired associate justice died peacefully Thursday at his home in New Hampshire nearly 16 years after he stepped down from the U.S. Supreme Court. He served the court for nearly 20 years and regularly sat on the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit for more than a decade, said Chief Justice John Roberts in a statement, adding that he will be greatly missed. Souter never married and never had children. Officials have not released details about his cause of death or funeral plans.

What is his background? Souter was born in Melrose, Mass., on Sept. 17, 1939, and grew up in New Hampshire. He graduated in 1961 from Harvard University with a degree in philosophy before completing a degree in jurisprudence at Oxford University in 1963. He then returned to Harvard to study law and graduated in 1966. Souter served as assistant attorney general of New Hampshire before becoming the state’s attorney general in 1976. Two years later he became a judge in a state court and was appointed to the New Hampshire Supreme Court in 1983. President George H.W. Bush in 1990 nominated Souter to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, but he served that court for just three months before Bush nominated him to replace outgoing Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan. He remained on the court until he retired in 2009. Justice Sonia Sotomayor replaced him on the court after former-President Barack Obama nominated her.

What is his track record? Though Republican politicians expected Souter to shift the court toward more conservative rulings, he consistently voted alongside liberal justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens. In the court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, Souter sided with the majority to reaffirm abortion access through Roe v. Wade and argued in favor of upholding the court’s precedent.

In the 1995 case Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston, Souter joined the court’s unanimous decision that a Massachusetts state court violated the first amendment rights of Boston’s Veterans’ Council by requiring them to include an LGBT organization in its private parade. In 2005 he joined four other justices to rule that three Kentucky counties violated the First Amendment by displaying the Ten Commandments in courthouses and schools.

Dig deeper: From the archives, read Jacob Parrish’s report about the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2009 giving Sotomayor their stamp of approval.