of drugs, economic disputes, family conflicts, and crimes of passion. In short, Mr. Chairman, David Souter has seen it all.

When you speak to those who appeared before David Souter in his capacity as a trial judge, his fairness and even-handedness in the administration of justice is cited by all.

On the New Hampshire Supreme Court, Judge Souter demonstrated that he is a classic conservative. Judge Souter respects precedent, applies the law to the facts before him, without predefined conclusions. He is committed to the application of the traditional rules of statutory construction and constitutional interpretation, and recognizes the proper role of judges in upholding the democratic choices of the people through their elected representatives.

As recently as April 13, 1990, Judge Souter wrote, as a member of that court, "The basic scheme of the Constitution is a limitation of powers. Government is limited and courts and legislatures can only do what they are authorized to do."

Judge Souter's opinion are admired for their crispness, their strength of reason, for their clarity, and for the intellectual attainment they demonstrate. His record makes clear his commitment to the rule of law, his full understanding of judicial restraint and precedent. I believe that his judicial philosophy reflects the thinking of the great Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, as expressed in Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway v. May. That quote says,

Great constitutional provisions must be administered with caution. Some play must be allowed for the joint of the machine, and it must be remembered that legislatures are the ultimate guardians of the liberties and welfare of the people in quite as great a degree as the courts.

I know how carefully the members of this committee and your staff have worked to assess this nomination. I know that your exchange with David Souter will be enlightening and comprehensive, as it should be. I think you will find a first-rate legal mind, a writer of great precision and force, a jurist of uncommon quality, who brings no agenda, no ideology to the bench, only a singleminded commitment to serve justice in the greatest traditions of American jurisprudence.

Mr. Chairman, Senator Thurmond, and members of this committee, I cannot let this moment pass without sharing with you my own observations of a man I have known and worked closely with for 20 years. Having sat for 10 years now in your positions at confirmation hearings, I know it is customary for a home State Senator to praise a native nominee. Indeed, I have done that, as we all have.

I want to make it clear today that my association with this man is far beyond that norm. David Souter is my friend. I trust him, I respect him, and I like him. He has made me think, he has made me reflect, and he has made me laugh.

When I became attorney general, our office was small. I recognized its potential to make a difference for the citizens of our State. To realize this potential, I needed to invigorate the office with new talent and new energy. David joined me in that task and succeeded me as Attorney general of our State.

He oversaw the expansion of the attorney general's office during my tenure and his own. He did so by recruiting a staff of young,

able, dedicated lawyers and then reared them to maturity. He hired on the basis of talent alone, no political, no philosophical tests. We soon boasted a staff that was the envy of law firms in that State. Today, those lawyers have led distinguished careers in their own right. A number are familiar to the members of this committee. They are judges, public servants, partners in major firms in our State and beyond.

To a person, they cite their relationship with the attorney general's office and David Souter, in particular, as the outstanding experience of their lives. That is because David did not just hire good lawyers, he hired good people. Once hired, he showed these people how a lawyer can and must balance all of the elements of a demanding professional career and a personal life. He stressed service to State and Nation, but also to your community and to your family. He brought the office together, not as a cheerleader, but as an understanding and concerned friend.

Much has been made of David's New Englandness—I think that is a word. I am not sure what it means. You do not have to spend much time in our State or our region at this time to appreciate its special qualities. I know, Mr. Chairman, that several members of this committee have had firsthand experiences in New Hampshire. You know that it is indeed a very special and a very unique place. But New England and New Hampshire are not just states of mind. They are real places, where real things happen to real people.

There is no demographic profile of the perfect judge. The people who we seek to discharge these responsibilities must have certain human qualities, not fixed life résumés. I know that David Souter, shaped by his experiences, knows that judges must understand that their decisions are not mere academic or scholarly exercises, but, rather, the best hope of resolving human dilemma.

Judges must realize that real people are impacted by what they do, that the essence of judging is its humanity. I am confident that my friend David Souter knows that.

Finally, Mr. Chairman, I must say that it is remarkable that there are some here in Washington who view a man who has a single-minded dedication to his chosen profession, the law, and possesses great qualities of humility, graciousness, frugality, charity, reverence to his faith and to his family is somehow regarded as an anomaly and somehow out of touch with life. I believe that most Americans see these as endearing and desirable qualities, all too often sacrificed in the frenetic pace of modern life.

In closing, Mr. Chairman and Senator Thurmond, allow me to suggest that we in New Hampshire are enormously proud to sit here today and have David Souter appear before this distinguished committee on the occasion of his confirmation hearings to our Nation's highest court.

His life has been rooted in our rocky soil and nurtured by a lifelong commitment to public service. I present to you a good person, one who will bring honor to the Supreme Court and to our constitutional system, with enthusiasm and with deep personal conviction. I urge your favorable consideration of a dear friend and a deserving nominee.

I thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Senator.

Judge Souter, you are a lucky man to have a friend like that, two friends, and we take their recommendations seriously and to heart.

Now, what we will do, Judge, if it meets with your approval, is we will recess until 2 p.m., at which time we will come back, swear you in, and begin the hearing.

We will recess until 2 p.m.

[Whereupon, at 12:29 p.m., the committee was in recess, to reconvene at 2 p.m., the same day.]

AFTERNOON SESSION

The CHAIRMAN. The hearing will come to order.

Judge, would you please stand to be sworn? Do you swear that the testimony you are about to give will be the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

Judge SOUTER. I do.

The CHAIRMAN. We are going to wait a moment while the photographers have an opportunity to leave and get their lunch or whatever they would like to do. They are very angry with me. [Pause.]

The CHAIRMAN. Welcome back to the hearing, Judge Souter. As I indicated before we left, we would welcome any opening statement you have to make for as short or as long as you wish to make it. Then we will begin with questions.

TESTIMONY OF HON. DAVID H. SOUTER, TO BE ASSOCIATE JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

Judge SOUTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I probably should begin by asking you if you can hear me as well as I can hear you. The CHAIRMAN. Yes, we can, Judge.

Judge SOUTER. Mr. Chairman, Senator Thurmond, and other members of the committee, as you know, I did not ask to make a formal and preprepared statement, but I would like to accept your invitation to say a few words before our dialog together does begin. I would like to start maybe in a very obvious way simply by saying thanks for some things, to begin with, to thank every member of this committee who, in the waning and the very hectic days that you went through prior to the summer recess, nonetheless found some time to see me when I came by to meet you, in most cases for the first time. I was grateful for the reception and the courtesy that every one of you gave to me.

Equally obviously, I would like simply to say here what I have already said privately this morning, or at least quietly this morning, in thanking both Senator Humphrey and Senator Rudman for their generosity to me in their introduction and their sponsorship of me before you. And I will have to continue, as I have been trying to do for the past 7 or 8 weeks now, to say some adequate thanks to the President of the United States for the confidence that he showed in me in making that nomination. I have not succeeded in doing that adequately yet, but I will keep trying.

In fact, I came to the notice of probably most of you on this committee when I stood next to the President and tried-again, with great difficulty-that afternoon in late July to express some sense

of the honor that I felt, despite the surprise and even shock of the event to me. It is equally incumbent on me to try to express some sense of the honor that I feel today in appearing before you, as you represent the Senate of the United States in discharging your own responsibility to review the President's nomination. I could only adopt what Senator Metzenbaum said earlier this morning about the grandeur of this process of which we are a part.

I mentioned to you the great surprise that I had on July 23 in finding myself where I was. I certainly found very quickly that I had no reason to be surprised at the interest which the United States and, actually, a good deal of the world suddenly took in me as an individual. And despite the reams of paper and I suppose the forests that have fallen to produce that paper in the time between July 23, I would like to take a minute before we begin our dialog together to say something to you about how I feel about the beginnings that I have come from and about the experiences that I have had that bear on the kind of judge that I am and the kind of judge that I can be expected to be.

I think you know that I spent most of my boyhood in a small town in New Hampshire-Weare, NH. It was a town large in geography, small in population. The physical space, the open space between people, however, was not matched by the interspace between them because, as everybody knows who has lived in a small town, there is a closeness of people in a small town which is unattainable anywhere else. There was in that town no section or place or neighborhood that was determined by anybody's occupation or by anybody's bank balance. Everybody knew everybody else's business, or at least thought they did. And we were, in a very true sense, intimately aware of other lives. We were aware of lives that were easy, and we were aware of lives that were very hard.

Another thing that we were aware of in that place was the responsibility of people to govern themselves. It was a responsibility that they owed to themselves, and it was a responsibility that they owed and owe to their neighbors. I first learned about that or I first learned the practicalities of that when I used to go over to the town hall in Weare, NH, on town meeting day. I would sit in the benches in the back of the town hall after school, and that is where I began my lessons in practical government.

As I think you know, I went to high school in Concord, NH, which is a bigger place, and I went on from there to college and to study law in Cambridge, ME, and Oxford, England, which are bigger places still. And after I had finished law school, I came back to New Hampshire, and I began the practice of law. And I think probably it is fair to say that I resumed the study of practical government.

I went to work for a law firm in Concord, NH, and I practiced there for several years. I then became, as I think you know, an assistant attorney general in the criminal division of that office. I was then lucky to be deputy attorney general to Warren Rudman, and I succeeded him as attorney general in 1976.

The experience of government, though, did not wait until the day came that I entered public as opposed to private law practice; because although in those years of private practice I served the private clients of the firm, I also did something in those days which

was very common then. Perhaps it is less common today-I know it is-but it was an accepted part of private practice in those days to take on a fair share of representation of clients who did not have the money to pay.

I remember very well the first day that I ever spent by myself in a courtroom. I spent in a courtroom representing a woman whose personal life had become such a shambles that she had lost the custody of her children, and she was trying to get them back. She was not the last of such clients. I represented clients with domestic relations problems who lived sometimes, it seemed to me, in appalling circumstances. I can remember representing a client who was trying to pull her life together after being evicted because she couldn't pay the rent.

Although cases like that were not the cases upon which the firm paid the rent, those were not remarkable cases for lawyers in private practice in those days before governmentally funded legal services. And they were the cases that we took at that time because taking them was the only way to make good on the supposedly open door of our courts to the people who needed to get inside and to get what courts had to offer through the justice system.

I think it is fair to say-I am glad it is fair to say-that even today, with so much governmentally funded legal service, there are lawyers in private practice in our profession who are doing the same thing.

As you know, I did go on to public legal service, and in the course of doing that, I met not only legislators and the administrators that one finds in the government, but I began to become familiar with the criminal justice system in my State and in our Nation. I met victims and sometimes I met the survivors of victims. I met defendants. I met that train of witnesses from the clergy to con artists who passed through our system and find themselves, either willingly or unwillingly, part of a search for truth and part of a search for those results that we try to sum up with the words of justice.

As you also know, after those years I became a trial judge, and my experience with the working of government and the judicial system broadened there because I was a trial judge of general jurisdiction, and I saw every sort and condition of the people of my State that a trial court of general jurisdiction is exposed to. I saw litigants in international commercial litigation for millions, and I saw children who were the unwitting victims of domestic disputes and custody fights which somehow seemed to defy any reasonable solution, however hard we worked at it.

I saw, once again, the denizens of the criminal justice system, and I saw domestic litigants. I saw appellants from the juvenile justice system who were appealing their findings of delinquency. And, in fact, I had maybe one of the great experiences of my entire life in seeing week in and week out the members of the trial juries of our States who are rightly called the consciences of our communities. And I worked with them, and I learned from them, and I will never forget my days with them.

When those days on the trial court were over, there were two experiences that I took away with me or two lessons that I had learned, and the lessons remain with me today. The first lesson,