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In the pantheon of U.S. Supreme Court justices, David Souter may not be the flashiest name, but his legacy offers a profound lesson for lawyers, judges, and students of the law: empathy—specifically intellectual empathy—is not weakness; it is a judicial strength.

Kent Greenfield, a former clerk to Justice Souter and now a law professor, paints an insightful portrait of a man whose rigorous intellect was matched by an ability to see beyond personal bias and institutional inertia. Souter’s legacy lies not in landmark culture-war rulings or ideological grandstanding but in his quiet insistence on listening, reflecting, and applying the law with clarity and compassion.

While many tributes have celebrated Souter’s humility and kindness, particularly his respect for everyone from janitorial staff to fellow justices, Greenfield zeroes in on a more subtle virtue—Souter’s intellectual empathy. Not mere emotional sympathy, this kind of empathy is a method of thought: the disciplined willingness to inhabit another’s perspective, to test assumptions, and to avoid the trap of seeing cases only through one’s own lens.

Empathy in Practice: Kyles v. Whitley

This concept becomes vivid in Souter’s handling of Kyles v. Whitley, a death penalty case involving Curtis Kyles, a Black man in Louisiana convicted of murdering a white woman over groceries and a red Ford LTD. The evidence against him appeared compelling—he matched witness descriptions, possessed the murder weapon, and allegedly sold the victim’s car afterward.

But Souter wasn’t satisfied with the official narrative.

Diving into the details, he noticed troubling omissions in the prosecution’s disclosures. Key eyewitness statements that didn’t match Kyles were withheld. More damningly, the state failed to disclose the questionable credibility of “Beanie,” an informant with a history of criminal activity and suspicious proximity to the crime scene. This lack of transparency fundamentally undermined the integrity of the trial.

Souter, drawing on his own background as a former state prosecutor, might have identified more naturally with law enforcement. But instead of taking their claims at face value, he questioned them—not because he thought Kyles was innocent, but because he recognized that justice requires fairness, even when the defendant is unpopular or unsympathetic.

His majority opinion emphasized a core constitutional rule: the government must not hide potentially exculpatory evidence. By adopting an intellectually empathetic stance—considering how it feels to stand accused without the full scope of facts—Souter persuaded four other justices and changed the course of Kyles’ life.

Seeing Power Structures: United States v. Drayton

In United States v. Drayton, Souter again showed how his empathy sharpened, rather than dulled, his legal analysis.

The facts: Police boarded a Greyhound bus, blocked the exits, and without informing passengers of their rights, asked two men to open their bags. Drugs were found. The majority held this to be a “consensual search.”

But Souter dissented.

He dissected the situation not from the privileged vantage of legal formalism but from the perspective of the average bus rider facing armed officers in the middle of the night. He wrote: “When the attention of several officers is brought to bear on one civilian the balance of immediate power is unmistakable.” His argument was grounded in reality—one likely foreign to his own life experience—but reached through an analytical process rooted in empathy.

This wasn’t about excusing drug traffickers. It was about truthfully assessing the dynamics of power, pressure, and choice. Souter reminded the Court—and the country—that coercion doesn’t always wear a badge or shout commands. Sometimes, it just stands quietly with a gun in a cramped aisle.

The Broader Jurisprudential Lesson

David Souter’s judicial methodology runs counter to the increasingly common view of judges as mere umpires “calling balls and strikes.” His decisions suggest something deeper: that judging is storytelling, listening, and reasoning all wrapped into one. The outcome isn’t dictated by personal emotion, but neither is it devoid of human context. Intellectual empathy, in Souter’s jurisprudence, is not an indulgence—it is essential to the integrity of legal outcomes.

Lawyers and law students can draw a powerful lesson here. Procedural rules, precedent, and doctrine form the backbone of our legal system. But if we fail to engage with the lives behind the case names, we risk reinforcing injustice rather than resolving it.

The fact that a reserved, Harvard-trained New Englander with a conservative background could consistently center the experiences of people unlike himself—from death row inmates to bus passengers suspected of drug smuggling—shows how intellectual empathy is not just noble, but necessary for real justice.

Empathy Beyond the Courtroom

Perhaps most poignantly, Greenfield closes with a reminder that Souter’s kind of empathy is not reserved for the bench. In every walk of life—spouse, friend, parent, colleague—we face moments that demand not just feeling, but understanding. We must listen, not just to respond, but to comprehend. In this, David Souter’s life is not only a legal model—it’s a human one.

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Source: https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/the-intellectual-empathy-of-david-souter/