A couple of years ago, this paper ran an appreciation I had written about former Supreme Court Justice David Souter. It was called “Where have you gone, David Souter?” and it lamented that precious few among us have such a sharply focused vision of right and wrong – and ethical and unethical behavior – that we can always count on them when the chips are down and we need challenging decisions to be made based on the public interest, not personal agendas.

Now he’s gone, and it feels like we’ve lost a critical rudder toward justice, decency and humanity during our turbulent voyage. Many who knew the justice have used those words to eulogize him since his passing, and I want to add a remembrance of my own.

Once, more than 20 years ago, when Souter was still at the court, I wrote to ask if he might speak to a New Hampshire group about his experiences in that rarefied environment. A month or more passed and I concluded he’d just been too busy to respond, what with the course of American life often turning on the votes he had to wrestle over with his colleagues, some of whom weren’t nearly as principled.

Then, after I’d largely forgotten about the whole business, I received a letter from the justice’s chambers at the court. As I opened it, I figured it was a canned “regret” from a clerk, thanking me kindly for my impossibly ambitious request. So, you can imagine my surprise when I saw it wasn’t a form letter written by some assistant at all, but a long personal composition by Souter himself. He explained that he’d been “going back and forth” about what to say, and that although he asked “to be excused from speaking,” he wanted to tell me why. Seriously?

He said what he “couldn’t stand to do . . . would be to show up with some dish of pablum” instead of offering anything really insightful about his colleagues past and present that might be interesting, but which would create “a lot of hoopla in the legal press if [his] remarks were reported outside the gathering.” He went on to regret that he has “to act on the assumption that nothing is confidential and nothing will be discreetly handled these days.”

Incredibly, he offered that “maybe I am just too unimaginative, in failing to come up with anything else that might be catchy” and that he expected his “deficiency has only been magnified by the preoccupation with some of the cases that have been argued in the latter part of this term.”

But even that wasn’t it. He ended by saying, “the deficiency I most regret is my discourtesy in keeping you waiting while I went back and forth on this, and I hope you’ll be indulgent in receiving this letter. Maybe sometime down the road I’ll feel I can do better by you, and I’ll try.” I was slack-jawed.

And I was bowled over. It didn’t even matter that he’d said no; he’d already done better by me than almost anything else he might have said. Just the idea that with the weight of the nation’s future at least partially on his shoulders – with votes to affirm, reverse or dissent also heavy on his mind – he’d made the time to compose almost 500 carefully chosen words and to offer them so personally and thoughtfully to someone he’d met long ago from a small town in New Hampshire. Well, it was nothing less than astounding.

A postscript is that while I never again pestered Souter to speak, a year or so after he’d retired from the court, I sent him a courtroom artist’s drawing of his last day on the bench and asked him to sign it for me. I don’t remember exactly the phrasing I used to thank him for his diligent preservation of the rule of law, but I’m sure it wasn’t much less fawning than what a teenager might have written to a favorite rock star.

Then, once again the time went by and I figured one of the justice’s assistants must have recycled my request with the used copy paper. But no, several months later, the drawing came back with another note begging forgiveness for its tardiness, and with an inscription that read, “From one New Hampshire judge to another.”

So, pardon me if I sound like a fanboy; however, we need more David Souters in every facet of our lives. Just by walking calmly, decently and respectfully among us, they clue the rest of us in about how to treat our fellow human beings, no matter where we may have come from. And we need those examples now more than ever, especially those among us who aren’t even receiving the barest of justice these days.

L. Phillips Runyon III has practiced law in Peterborough for 50 years and was the presiding justice of the 8th Circuit Court for 27 years.