He wasn't a flashy writer or a wheeler and dealer or a judicial ideologue determined to shape the court in his image. Justice David Hackett Souter, who is retiring this year after 19 years on the Supreme Court, probably won't be remembered for groundbreaking opinions or deft coalition building.

Instead, court watchers say, Souter will be remembered as a judge's judge: a thoughtful jurist, a scholar of precedent, and a kind friend to colleagues and clerks.

He will also be remembered as a disappointment to conservatives, the justice who was promised as a "home run" for the right and ended up voting mostly with the liberals on the court.

"I think there's a general consensus that he wasn't the most influential justice of his time, but in some ways he never sought to be," said Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University and a journalist who writes frequently about the court. "He was more interested in getting the law right and approaching each case with integrity than he was in building coalitions or articulating a judicial vision that others could rally around."

Historically, Souter's tenure on the Supreme Court may be most important because of its timing. Souter joined the court just as Republican appointees had begun to reclaim it after decades of transformative liberal rulings. If he'd been a conservative firebrand, he could have contributed to a revolution, rejecting many of those prior decisions and reshaping the court's role in society. Instead, he voted most often with the court's liberals, typically upholding previous rulings.

Most famously, in 1992, he forged a coalition to preserve the guarantee of legal abortion established by Roe v. Wade.

That decision endeared him to many liberals and angered many on the right. But the central message of his writing was not that Roe was correctly decided, but that the court needed to preserve its own integrity by standing behind even controversial decisions.

"In the overarching narrative of where the court is going, his importance was as the Republican nominee who voted like a Democratic nominee - who basically ensured that the Supreme Court would stay in the same position over this 20-year period rather than really shift to the right," said Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University.

Souter's position as an impediment rather than an aid to reshaping the court made him a symbol to the conservative legal community. "No more Souters," became a rallying cry that many court watchers said has changed the way presidents approach judicial nominations.

"His nomination will go down in history as maybe the last one where a president took a big leap based on somebody's promise about their views rather than deep study," said Tom Goldstein, the co-head of litigation and Supreme Court practice at Akin Gump, Straus, Hauer and Field in Washington, who frequently argues cases before the Supreme Court. "Since then, presidents have known a lot more about their nominees, and I think that will be one more part of his legacy."

In 1990, then-White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu famously promised President George H.W. Bush that Souter would be "a home run" for conservatives, without the kind of baggage that would make for a difficult confirmation fight.

This week, Sununu said that Souter sold himself to presidential advisers as a "very conservative

Republican," and had an extensive record supporting that image.

"The idea that there was no paper trail is just not correct," Sununu said.

Preserving the past

At his confirmation hearings, Souter described himself as a particular kind of judicial conservative, one committed to the court's previous decisions and to incremental change. Because he joined the court after decades of liberal Warren and Burger court decisions, defending old law often meant preserving liberal decisions. (next page »)