In his first year, Souter joined Rehnquist in several conservative rulings, one of which forbade doctors and nurses in federally funded clinics from discussing abortion with their patients.
Then Justice Thurgood Marshall retired in 1991, and Bush chose Clarence Thomas, a 43-year-old black conservative, to replace him.
With Republican appointees holding eight seats, Rehnquist was set to move the law toward the right. (At the Justice Department, Bush's solicitor general, Kenneth W. Starr, and his top deputy, John G. Roberts Jr., filed briefs urging the court to do just that.)
But Souter balked.
The conservative counter-revolution was halted when he in effect switched sides, just as his colleagues were set to roll back liberal rulings on civil rights, abortion and religion.
When it looked in the spring of 1992 that the majority would vote to again allow states to ban abortion, Souter wrote what he expected to be a dissent and explained why the court should stick with its precedents. He knew Justice Sandra Day O'Connor agreed with him. And to their surprise, so did Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, a Reagan appointee.
By late June, they had drafted a joint opinion to preserve the Roe vs. Wade ruling. Justices John Paul Stevens and Harry Blackmun, Republican appointees from the 1970s, joined them to make a 5-4 majority, dealing Rehnquist an unexpected defeat.
Souter never returned to the conservative fold. He sharply dissented, along with Stevens, when the Rehnquist court limited the federal government's power to protect rights for women and workers with disabilities. By the mid-1990s, he regularly voted with Stevens and the two Democratic appointees: Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.
Souter was taken aback to see himself referred to as one of the court's "liberals."
Among conservatives, he was seen as a betrayer. In recent years, when President George W. Bush had vacancies to fill, their slogan was: "No More Souters."
Friends and former clerks, however, say it is a mistake to think Souter had a liberal conversion after joining the high court.
"They had a mistaken idea of what they were getting" when he was selected, said Kermit Roosevelt, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who clerked for Souter. Though a former prosecutor and state judge in New Hampshire, Souter was never a conservative activist or a cultural warrior, Roosevelt said.
He was, however, a man of tradition.
