David Souter, a New Hampshire Republican who was named to the Supreme Court by President George H.W. Bush and who over 19 years became a mainstay of the court’s shrinking liberal wing, died Thursday at his home in New Hampshire. He was 85.

His death was announced Friday morning by the Supreme Court, which did not cite a cause, saying only that he had died “peacefully.”

A shy man who never married and who preferred an evening alone with a book to the company of Washington insiders, Souter retired at 69 to return to his home state. His retirement at the end of the court’s 2008-09 term gave President Barack Obama a Supreme Court vacancy in the opening months of his presidency. The president named Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the seat.

By the end of his second year on the Supreme Court, Souter had acquired the label that would stick for the remainder of his tenure. He was the justice who surprised the president who appointed him; who left conservative Republicans bitterly disappointed; whose migration on the bench from right to left led to the cry of “no more Souters” when another president named Bush, George W., had Supreme Court vacancies to fill.

Those who expressed such surprise, who either implicitly or directly accused Souter of having portrayed himself one way and of turning out to be something else entirely, either failed to pay attention to his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing in September 1990, or chose not to believe what they heard.

Souter tipped his hand most directly in a colloquy with Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who asked him for his views on “judicial activism” and “government by the judiciary.” These were code words intended to give the nominee a chance to show his conservative stripes by proclaiming a profound dislike for both concepts.

But he did not take the hint.

“Courts must accept their own responsibility for making a just society,” Souter replied, to the senator’s evident consternation.

The nominee also raised alarms among conservatives with his effusive praise for the man he was named to replace, Justice William Brennan, the court’s liberal leader who had abruptly retired on July 20 at age 84 after suffering a stroke. Brennan would be remembered “as one of the most fearlessly principled guardians of the American Constitution that it has ever had and ever will have,” Souter predicted.

Despite their qualms, Senate Republicans did their duty for President George H.W. Bush. Souter was confirmed on Oct. 2, 1990, by a vote of 90-9. All the nays came from Democrats.

Souter was little known even in Washington legal circles when Bush introduced him to the country as his first Supreme Court nominee on July 23, 1990. He was a 50-year-old Harvard Law School graduate who had been confirmed to a federal judgeship in Boston only two months earlier.

For 12 years before that, he had been a state judge in New Hampshire. A bachelor, he still lived in the farmhouse where he grew up in the Concord suburb of Weare.

Despite his nearly nonexistent national profile, Souter had a powerful ally in Washington — Sen. Warren B. Rudman, R-N.H. As New Hampshire’s attorney general, Rudman had become a mentor to Souter, then a young lawyer in his office, making him his deputy and eventually pushing him forward as his successor as attorney general, an appointed post in New Hampshire.

It was Rudman’s sponsorship that later placed his protégé on the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and that led, quite directly, during the frantic weekend at the White House that followed Brennan’s unexpected retirement, to the Supreme Court selection. Strongly in Souter’s favor was the fact he had so recently been vetted within the administration and confirmed unanimously by the Senate to the appeals court.

Souter’s ascetic lifestyle was unaffected by the fact that over the years, through a series of mergers involving a bank in which he held stock, he became among the wealthiest of the justices. In 2007, he valued his stock in Chittenden Corp. — a financial services company based in Vermont that was the successor to the bank in which he had originally invested $160,000 — at between $5 million and $25 million.

The Washington social scene held absolutely no appeal. As soon as the court recessed for vacation, Souter promptly repaired to New Hampshire, where he unwound from the term by seeing old friends, hiking in the White Mountains, sailing and reading. He maintained chambers at the federal courthouse in Concord.

Even as the court became more conservative and polarized, liberals managed to eke out some important victories, most by votes of 5-4, which would not have been possible had he turned out to be the justice that many conservatives assumed him to be at the time of his nomination.

David Hackett Souter was born Sept. 17, 1939, in Melrose, Mass., where his father was an officer in a bank. When David was 11, the family moved to the farmhouse in Weare that his mother had inherited from her parents.

On his mother’s side, he traced his lineage to the Mayflower and shared ancestors with several U.S. presidents, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Bushes.

He graduated second in his high school class and entered Harvard, intending to pursue a degree in theology. He soon changed his career goal to law, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in the class of 1961 and becoming one of 32 American students that year to win the prestigious Rhodes scholarship for two years of study at Oxford. He studied jurisprudence, earning top honors.

After graduation from Harvard Law School in 1966, he went back to Concord to practice law at a small firm. Two years later, he joined the state attorney general’s office.

Rudman became attorney general in 1970 and chose Souter as his deputy. When Rudman’s term expired in 1976, he persuaded Gov. Meldrim Thomson Jr. to make Souter the next attorney general, at age 36. Two years later, the governor named him to the Superior Court, the state’s trial court.

A new governor, John Sununu, elevated Souter to the state Supreme Court in 1983. He became restless on the state court, particularly after Sununu passed him over for the chief justiceship in 1986.

So he was happy to accept the nomination his friend Rudman engineered for him to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. After his unanimous Senate confirmation, the circuit’s chief judge and a future Supreme Court associate justice himself, Stephen Breyer, swore him in on May 25, 1990. Souter had participated in only a few cases and had not written an opinion by the time the Supreme Court nomination came his way two months later.

Souter’s first term on the court was a fairly quiet one. But the future of the court’s 1973 abortion-rights precedent, Roe v. Wade, arrived at the court’s doorstep midway through the next term. The new case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, was argued on April 22, 1992, and it was anticipated that Roe would be overturned.

But Souter, joined by two other Republican-appointed justices, Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, collaborated to produce an unusual joint opinion that reaffirmed the constitutional right to abortion. With Justices Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens joining the central parts of the opinion, the vote was 5-4.

Souter’s portion of the opinion emphasized stare decisis, Latin for “to stand by what has been decided,” or adherence to precedent. The justices well knew that the decision was unpopular in some quarters. Yet many others had accepted it and relied on it; indeed, “The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.”

So “to overrule Roe’s essential holding under the existing circumstances,” Souter continued, would come “at the cost of both profound and unnecessary damage to the court’s legitimacy, and to the nation’s commitment to the rule of law.”

It was a stunning moment that inflamed the political right. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Souter’s alienation from the conservatives grew as Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist launched his federalism revolution in the mid-1990s: In a series of 5-4 rulings, the court limited the ability of Congress to make federal laws fully applicable to state governments. Souter wrote some strong dissenting opinions from these decisions, as well as from rulings that opened the door to a greater accommodation of religion in public life.

His most bitter moment as a dissenter undoubtedly came in Bush v. Gore, the 5-4 decision that ended the disputed Florida recount and effectively declared Texas Gov. George W. Bush the winner of the 2000 presidential election. Souter watched, appalled, as the conservatives accepted jurisdiction of the appeal filed by lawyers for Bush, who wanted to stop the recount that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered at the behest of the Democratic candidate, Vice President Al Gore.

On Dec. 9, the justices voted 5-4 to issue a stay of the statewide recount that had begun hours earlier. The case was argued on the morning of Dec. 11 and decided in Bush’s favor late on the night of Dec. 12.

The court should never have taken the case, Souter said in his dissent; “our customary respect for state interpretations of state law counsels against rejection of the Florida court’s determination in this case.”

The court’s 2006-07 term brought another low when a conservative majority under Chief Justice John Roberts, strengthened by O’Connor’s retirement and her replacement, Justice Samuel Alito, prevailed in a series of important cases.

He told friends over the years that he wanted to retire but did not want to create another vacancy for Bush to fill. He sent his retirement letter to Obama on May 1, 2009, mere months after the new president’s inauguration.

There are no immediate survivors.

After he retired, Souter sold the family farmhouse and moved to a home he bought in nearby Hopkinton. The reason, he explained, was his large book collection, which the old farmhouse could neither hold nor structurally support.