It feels nice, but I'm not sure it will have the desired effect.
Thank you. Doesn't it seem silly, since if this suceeds at all, (and that is doubtful) he will simply take the 'fair market value' and move on. He will not give everyone the satisfaction of a single court hearing. let alone his case reaching the Supreme Court. Many people here seem to have a great misunderstanding of how things work in the legal system. His best defense of his own ruling is to simply agree with the town council and move on.
From reading this, I would guess that he might have some sentimental attachment to the property in question:
David H. Souter
1990-
DAVID HACKETT SOUTER was born in Melrose, Massachusetts, September 17, 1939, the only child of Joseph A. Souter and Helen Hackett Souter. Although he lived with his parents in Massachusetts, Souter spent much of his youth, including most summers, at his maternal grandparents’ farmhouse in Weare, a small New Hampshire town twenty miles southwest of Concord, the state capital.
After his grandparents had passed away, Souter, age eleven, and his family moved to the farmhouse. His father was a banker with the New Hampshire Savings Bank in Concord. He died in 1976, but Souter's mother still lives near the family farmhouse in a retirement community.
Souter has called Weare, which borders Hopkinton Lake, "a town large in geography [and] small in population," where everybody "knew everybody else’s business or at least thought they did. And we were, in a very true sense, intimately aware of other lives. We were aware of lives that were easy and lives that were very hard." It is, indeed, a typical small town in rural New England, still governed by a town meeting. Souter learned many "lessons in practical government" by sitting in the back bench of the Weare Town Hall and watching the town meetings.
Souter attended the local public school and was immediately recognized as a student of great promise. One of his teachers later observed that the small school could not contain his "bounding intelligence." Souter's parents sent him to Concord High School, where he excelled academically. He graduated in 1957 and was voted "most sophisticated" and "most likely to succeed" by his classmates.
He continued his education at Harvard, where he majored in philosophy and wrote his senior honors thesis on the jurisprudence of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Souter was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude in 1961. Awarded a Rhodes scholarship to attend Oxford University for two years, he studied jurisprudence at Magdalen College, where he received bachelor's and master's degrees.
In 1963 Souter returned to Harvard to study law. Despite the demands of his legal curriculum, Souter also served as proctor for an undergraduate dormitory. This role required him to be "on call" twenty-four hours a day to counsel thirty Harvard freshmen, who presented him with the wide variety of problems and challenges young students face in adjusting to college and life away from home.
Souter had no interest in practicing law anywhere other than New Hampshire. When he graduated in 1966 he accepted a position as an associate with a prominent Concord law firm, Orr and Reno, where he had worked as a summer law clerk. He had a general legal practice that included matters of corporate law and taxation, real estate law, and general litigation. A portion of his practice was pro bono, representing clients who could not afford to pay the usual fees charged by the firm. It was on behalf of one of these clients, a woman who had lost custody of her children and was trying to get them back, that Souter first appeared in court.
Even after only a brief period in private practice, a colleague at Orr and Reno suggested that Souter "would seem to be a natural judge." He was too young for such an appointment, but he was nonetheless interested in public service. A partner at the firm observed that Souter "wanted to break out, to be in charge of something, to be responsible for his own outcomes." When the attorney general of New Hampshire offered Souter a position in 1968, he accepted immediately.
Souter began his career in public service as an assistant attorney general in the criminal division. He was assigned to cases at both the trial and appellate levels. He also performed special assignments for the attorney general and deputy attorney general. His major cases included a murder prosecution arising out of a gangland killing and a dispute between the Atlantic coast states and the federal government over title to under-sea resources outside the three-mile territorial limit.
When Warren B. Rudman became attorney general of New Hampshire in 1971, he selected Souter as his deputy. Rudman, who later became a U.S. senator, recalls his promotion of Souter. "I could see how brilliant he was, how valuable to the work of the office." A close and enduring friendship developed between the two men during the five years Souter served as deputy attorney general. Together, they built the attorney general's office into an extremely effective legal office. Souter's responsibilities included supervising the work of other lawyers in the office and counseling senior government officials.
Gov. Meldrin Thompson, impressed with Souter's work, appointed him attorney general in 1976 when Rudman resigned to enter private practice. Among the major issues in which Souter was involved was a vigorous and successful campaign to prevent legalized casino gambling in New Hampshire. He also participated in the prosecution of more than 1,000 protesters who had occupied the Seabrook nuclear power plant in 1977.
Although a Republican, Souter was never active in party politics. He devoted all of his energies to his legal practice, taking time out only to attend his Episcopal church and to pursue hobbies such as mountain climbing, classical music, and reading. His civic activities included fourteen years' service on the Board of Trustees of Concord Hospital, of which he was president from 1978 to 1984. A history buff, he has also served as vice president of the New Hampshire Historical Society.
In 1978, after two years as attorney general, Souter was appointed associate justice of the New Hampshire Superior Court, the state's trial court of general jurisdiction. The justices of the superior court do not have chambers or a courtroom in any particular county; rather, they travel from county to county trying cases. Thus, during his service on this court, Souter "rode the circuit" of New Hampshire's ten counties, presiding in the courthouses of Berlin, Laconia, Dover, Keene, Manchester, and Concord. As Souter later described it, he presided over every type of case imaginable and "saw every sort and condition of the people of my State that a trial court of general jurisdiction is exposed to. I saw litigants in international commercial litigation for millions, and I saw children who were the unwitting victims of domestic disputes and custody fights."
A substantial number of cases over which Souter presided were criminal prosecutions, and he acquired a reputation as a tough but fair judge with criminal defendants. A former public defender in New Hampshire who tried numerous cases before Souter has stated, "He was an excellent trial judge, although he was the kind of judge you knew was really going to hammer people at sentencing." Souter developed a keen interest in and respect for the jury system. He had a practice of meeting with the members of the jury after a case to discuss their participation in the legal system. One lawyer who appeared frequently before Souter observed that, as a result of his solicitous treatment, "juries loved him."
Looking back on his service as a trial judge, Souter believes he learned two important lessons about judging that remain with him. First, "whether we are on a trial court or an appellate court, at the end of our task some human being is going to be affected." Second, "if, indeed, we are going to be trial judges, whose rulings will affect the lives of other people and who are going to change their lives by what we do, we had better use every power of our minds and our hearts and our beings to get those rulings right."
Souter took those lessons with him to the Supreme Court of New Hampshire when Gov. John Sununu appointed him an associate justice in 1983. Administering the oath of office, Sununu remarked, "When I'm old and gray, people will say, 'This is one of the greatest things you did as governor.'" During his seven years on the state supreme court, Souter developed a reputation as a scholarly, tough-minded intellectual with a deep respect for precedent and history. "He really raised the level of an already fine court," one litigator before that court noted. "He dominated oral arguments, and he resurrected cases and jurists that had been ignored for years."
Souter not only brought a broad historical perspective to the New Hampshire Supreme Court, but also he demonstrated a fierce independence on matters of principle. In State v. Koppel (1987) he dissented from a decision holding that random checkpoints to catch drunk drivers were unconstitutional under the New Hampshire Constitution. Subsequently, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that such checkpoints are legal under the federal Constitution.
Souter's reputation as a jurist soon extended beyond New Hampshire. President Ronald Reagan seriously considered him as a nominee to the Supreme Court in 1987. In April 1990 President George Bush named Souter to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Three months later, Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., retired from the Supreme Court, and Senator Rudman recommended that the president appoint Souter to fill the seat. On July 23, 1990, three days after Brennan's retirement, Bush announced his intention to nominate Souter to the Court. Having served only a few months as a federal judge, Souter was not a well-known national figure.
The press investigated the conservative, hard-working bachelor's past, but could find nothing controversial. When his confirmation hearings began, as one newspaper reported, Souter "cast aside the silence that had clothed his nomination to the United States Supreme Court to reveal intelligence, poise--and a sense of humor." The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Joseph Biden, told Souter at the conclusion of his testimony, "I ... have been impressed with your knowledge. I have been impressed with your ability to articulate your position. I have been impressed with the ease with which you were able to make clear the purpose behind ... a number of decisions, including even referring to the sense within those opinions that most would spend time in a law library having to look up. And you have done it off the top of your head."
Souter was confirmed October 2, 1990, by a 90-9 vote, and took his seat on the Court a week later. He has since emerged as the intellectual leader of the Court's centrist coalition, often carving out a middle ground for other justices to join. A moderate pragmatist, Souter shows a strong respect for precedent. This tendency was reflected in his first major opinion, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), which, in an unusual move, he wrote with Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy. The Court's opinion permitted several state regulations of abortion to stand, but declined to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Souter has written on a wide variety of subjects. He dissented on First Amendment free speech grounds from a decision allowing a person to sue a newspaper for its failure to honor a promise of confidentiality. In Cohen v. Cowles Media Co. (1991) he found the state's interest in enforcing a newspaper's promise of confidentiality did not outweigh the public's interest in the unfettered publication of information. In 1992 he wrote the opinion for the Court in Norman v. Reed, invalidating on constitutional grounds portions of the Illinois election law that unduly burdened access to the ballot by new political parties. And in a forceful concurring opinion in a capital case, Souter joined the majority in concluding that information about a murder victim may be presented to a sentencing jury.
Souter has developed a reputation as a charming wit with a wry sense of humor who delights in entertaining colleagues and visitors with tall tales. Despite his move to Washington, D.C., Souter retains the traits of a rugged, individualistic New Englander. He refuses to wear an overcoat, even on the coldest days, and he brings his lunch to work (usually an apple and yogurt). At night, after work, he will often go for a long run. During the summer, he returns to his home in Weare and climbs the tallest peaks of the nearby White Mountains.
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