David Souter, who died on Thursday at age 85, was perhaps the most important Supreme Court justice of the late twentieth century. His appointment to the high court in 1990 was meant to cement the conservative legal counterrevolution, washing away the heady liberalism of the 1950s and 1960s in favor of right-wing constitutional theories. George H.W. Bush nominated Souter to the high court in 1990 expecting him to be a reliable conservative vote. He was, though not in the way that Bush and other