G. Edward White (University of Virginia School of Law) has posted Taking Stock of Justice Souter on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
With Justice David Souter’s death in May, 2025 there has been a revival of interest in his life and career on the Supreme Court, but Souter remains largely unknown to the general public and there has been a paucity of efforts to characterize his performance as a justice. The result has been the presence of some uninformed conventional wisdom about Souter’s tenure on the Court. Souter has been characterized as a “stealth nominee,” one with a very sparse record as a lower court judge who deliberately hid his ideological tendencies during his nomination and was consequently expected to be a predictable conservative but turned out not to be so. It has also been suggested that Souter, after a first Term in which he regularly voted along with right-leaning justices, “moved left” after the appointments of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer in the early 1990s, justices whose liberal voting patterns influenced Souter. Finally, it has been claimed that Souter’s nomination ushered in a sea-change in the process of nominating justices: one in which the primary goal of nominating presidents and confirming senators has been to identify ideologically predictable justices, “no more Souters.”
Highly recommended.