When I arrived at the Supreme Court as a 20-year-old undergraduate, I was directed to the clerk’s office, where an assistant phoned Justice David Souter’s chambers to announce my arrival. To my surprise, it was the Justice himself who came down the hall to meet me. He could easily have sent a clerk or a secretary, but he appeared alone, smiling shyly, and led me back to his chambers.
The occasion had begun with a letter I sent on a bit of a hunch. I had read in The New York Times that Souter, recently appointed to the Court, had studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Harvard. I was in the middle of launching the Harvard Review of Philosophy, and I invited him to be interviewed. He declined—citing the prudence expected of a sitting Justice—but added a line that surprised me: if I happened to be in Washington, I was welcome to stop by informally. Naturally, I found a reason to make the trip.
Before I went, I did my homework. I tracked down his undergraduate thesis, written three decades earlier on Oliver Wendell Holmes and judicial pragmatism. I remember noticing that after many years of total obscurity, the thesis had recently begun circulating again—requested by a handful of journalists curious to peer back into the early intellectual formation of a newly seated Justice. It struck me as an oddly poetic archival moment: youthful scholarship, long ignored, suddenly reemerging into public attention. I wondered, as any undergraduate might, whether anything I was writing at Harvard would ever emerge from its own obscurity.
Our lunch was modest. He ordered me a sandwich—nothing fancy—and took for himself a small bowl of cottage cheese. I mentioned that I had been studying under John Rawls and Robert Nozick, two towering but opposing figures in moral and political philosophy. He spoke of them with evident admiration and intellectual reverence, suggesting—without any false humility—that he saw himself as operating on a very different plane. He was eager to shift attention away from himself and toward the ideas.
Afterward, I sent him a Harvard mug as a small thank you. He responded with a note that read, “Veritas now reigns in the cup collection.”
What followed over the next several years was an occasional but memorable correspondence. His notes—always warm, thoughtful, and unadorned—tracked my progress through Harvard, Oxford, and beyond. One especially kind letter came after I was awarded a summa in philosophy. “However proud you may be,” he wrote, “you are not overly so. I could not be more impressed.” He added congratulations on my impending study at Oxford—a place he clearly remembered fondly. He had just finished Ved Mehta’s Up at Oxford, which he recommended, noting that the Oxford it described “was pretty much my own,” though perhaps now dated. “Enjoy the happy observance of Commencement,” he closed, “and plan to enjoy Oxford.”
When I later wrote to say I had been admitted to Yale Law School, he surprised me again by offering words of caution. Law school, he warned, was rarely enjoyable and, in his view, the legal profession was no longer the “learned profession” it once aspired to be. He wrote:
“If you are not planning to be a lawyer, think twice and hard about law school. For most people, it isn’t much fun (it certainly wasn’t for me), and although legal training can be very helpful in all sorts of pursuits, I think it’s wise to have at least a provisional sense of what its value might be to you before you commit yourself to three years of legal study. If you would be going to law school because you have an intention to be a lawyer, I would again advise you to think twice and hard.
My general advice to anyone considering a legal career is to stop thinking about it. The profession is not the so-called learned profession that we were still able to conceive when I was at your point in life, and all lawyers seem to have scads of lawyer friends who wish they were doing something other than practicing law. It is, in any case, not a profession to follow unless you are very certain just why it is you want to follow it; it is the poorest of default choices. If you are satisfied that you are unlikely to be fulfilled in life except as a lawyer, then go ahead. But otherwise, I think you would be better off doing something else.”
It was remarkable advice—forthright, even blunt—and I remember being struck not only by the substance of it, but by the fact that it came from someone at the summit of the profession he was so skeptical about.
I went anyway.
When I wrote to tell him, he responded with characteristic good humor: “I can’t remember any instance in which anyone took my advice to avoid law school,” he admitted, adding that he hoped it would turn out to be the right choice for me.
Looking back, what I remember most about Justice Souter is not his public role or even his private advice, but the way he carried himself—with humility, curiosity, and a gentle awareness of life’s ironies. Here was a man who had reached the highest judicial office in the land, yet met a nervous undergraduate at the clerk’s office himself, served him a sandwich, and shifted the conversation toward ideas larger than either of them. What stayed with me just as strongly was the steady generosity he showed in the years that followed—his handwritten notes, candid reflections, and thoughtful encouragement, all offered despite the extraordinary demands on his time.
Justice Souter’s legacy will rightly be measured by his opinions and votes on the Court. But for me, it will always be marked by something quieter and rarer: an intellectual modesty that honored not only the life of the mind, but also the dignity of sustained human connection.
