ABSTRACT
David H. Souter served as assistant and deputy attorney general in New Hampshire and was appointed state attorney general, succeeding his mentor, Warren Rudman, who went on to be US senator. Souter was attorney general under an ultraconservative governor and argued a conservative position before the courts. As a New Hampshire judge, he was known for his strict construction of the Constitution. In Rust v. Sullivan, 500 US 173, Justice Souter cast the deciding vote to uphold Health and Human Services regulations preventing federal funds for programs in which abortion was a method of family planning. Justice Souter was in the majority in the 1991 Johnson Controls case, which barred employers from excluding fertile employees from jobs that might harm fetuses they might conceive. He was the lone dissent in National Endowment for the Arts v. Findley, 524 US 569, disagreeing that Congress could constrain the National Endowment for the Arts ability to fund certain categories of artistic expression.
