Lessons about home and humility from Justice Souter 

This article is part of a series on the legacy and jurisprudence of the late Justice David Souter. 

Michael Mongan currently serves as the California Solicitor General. He clerked for Justice David Souter from 2007 to 2008.

In the days since Justice Souter passed away, I’ve struggled to assemble words that convey the depth of my feelings about him.

Some portion of that difficulty might be attributed to the private and humble manner in which he lived his life. He generally avoided making public remarks outside the courtroom (with a few notable exceptions, like his outstanding speech at Harvard in 2010). He spent much of his time and energy in the confines of his judicial chambers, along with those lucky few whom he hired to serve as clerks and assistants. Many of the deeds and remarks that define him in my mind arose in that confidential setting and will go with me and my colleagues to our graves. 

The greater part of the problem is that words are imperfect substitutes for human emotions. Although I earn my living by describing complex legal subjects, when it comes to describing my admiration and love for David Hackett Souter, the written word seems inadequate for the task at hand.

What I can say is that he profoundly influenced who I am, as a lawyer and a human being, for reasons quite apart from his piercing intellect and his principled jurisprudence.

To begin, Justice Souter taught me the value of home. For him, home was not an abstract concept but a precise physical location: the hamlet of Weare, New Hampshire. He moved there with his parents at a young age to live in a farmhouse handed down from his mother’s family, and his heart never left. 

Living in New Hampshire grounded him in a community that shaped and shared his basic values. It preserved the bonds with his oldest friends and his most cherished memories. And it distanced him from the pressures inherent in any place to which people move for the purpose of amassing wealth or power.

That attachment to home was a lodestar of his adult life. With his smarts and credentials, he could have been an immediate success in academia, on Wall Street, or anywhere else. But he chose to return from Harvard to his home, entering the private practice of law at a small, local firm; rising through the ranks of state government to become New Hampshire Attorney General; then rising through the state judiciary to the New Hampshire Supreme Court. His later public prominence came despite his geographical choices, not because of them.

Eventually, after President George H.W. Bush called on him to serve on the Supreme Court, he relocated to Washington for part of each year. But he never gave up his true home and he returned there as often as possible. The broadest smile I ever saw on his face was in June 2008, at the end of the term during which I clerked for him, as he walked to his Volkswagen to drive back to New Hampshire — as rapidly as the traffic laws allowed.

Justice Souter’s undying relationship with his home was an object lesson for me. A California kid with an interest in law and politics, I assumed my only option was to locate my career in Washington. After my clerkship, I worked in the Obama administration. I loved the professional buzz of Washington as well as the friends I made there. And the career opportunities for someone with my credentials seemed more attractive in Washington than anywhere else. 

But my true home — my Weare — was in the San Francisco Bay Area, where my family had lived for generations and my oldest friends remained. When my wife and I were expecting our first child in 2010, Justice Souter gave me the courage to return to my home. With his example in mind, I knew that returning would be the better move for me and my family, come what might professionally. And — as so often happens — the best move personally turned into the best move professionally, leading to a fulfilling career in private practice and government service in my native state.    

Justice Souter also showed me how to be a public servant. His models of public service were not the well-known names that populate our history books, but the forgotten early statesmen of the Massachusetts Bay Colony — once described by Nathaniel Hawthorne as men who “had fortitude and self-reliance, and, in time of difficulty or peril, stood up for the welfare of the state like a line of cliffs against a tempestuous tide.” For them, public service was a pursuit worthwhile not for fame or power, but for the greater satisfaction that comes from quietly and resolutely advancing the rule of law and safeguarding their political community.

And done right, there was joy in it too. For Justice Souter, doing it right meant working hard — seven days a week, often late into the evening. It meant doing most of the work himself. (I’m not spilling any chambers secrets to say that the distinctive nineteenth-century prose that characterizes his opinions in the United States Reports could only have been written by him personally.) And it meant approaching the job with an intellectual rigor and humility befitting the indeterminacy of so many of the legal questions that reach the Supreme Court.  

That may not be everyone’s idea of a good time. But it made Justice Souter happy. He was one of those fortunate few who united his avocation and vocation, to steal a line from one of his favorite poets.

Last, Justice Souter taught me (and everyone else who encountered him) the meaning of the word mensch. 

Despite his popular reputation as a bit of a curmudgeon, he was the most charming and witty person I’ve known: a raconteur of the highest order, with a wry smile and a humorous story fit for any circumstance.

He was unfailingly kind to those around him — no matter their position. It seemed to me that he knew the name of every custodian, elevator operator, and police officer in the building. Not just their name, but their spouse’s name, and their kids’ names, and their family history. He invested in those relationships not for show, but because of a fundamental human decency that transcended ordinary courtesy. He genuinely cared about other human beings.

He was the embodiment of honesty and judicial ethics.

And he was a terrific boss: solicitous of our ideas, generous with his time and mentorship, encouraging when we needed it, and empathetic when we made mistakes.  

I will miss him more than I can say.