Violent unrest following the death of a teen killed by police has spread to Paris suburbs and elsewhere.
A car burns as a slogan is seen on a wall which reads in French “Justice for Nahel” | Geoffrey Van Der Hasselt/AFP via Getty Images
More than 600 people were arrested in France on Thursday night as riots spread across the country. The violence erupted after a 17-year-old boy, named as Nahel M., was shot dead by police earlier this week during a traffic stop in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris.
Despite the deployment of some 40,000 police officers, authorities struggled to control the clashes in major cities and smaller urban areas alike. Public buildings and transportation systems were the main targets, but some districts saw shops looted, too.
A man walks by burning tyres blocking a street in Bordeaux | Philippe Lopez/AFP via Getty Images
People walk by burning tyres blocking a street in Bordeaux | Philippe Lopez/AFP via Getty Images
Men throw tyres in a fire blocking a street in Bordeaux | Philippe Lopez/AFP via Getty Images
Burning vehicles lie in a street of the Cite Pablo Picasso area of Nanterre | Zakaria Abdelkafi/AFP via Getty Images
A police officer of unit RAID (Research, Assistance, Intervention, deterrence) stands guard during protests in Lille | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
CRS riot police face protesters, with the “Grande Arche de la Defense” seen in the background in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre | Zakaria Abdelkafi/AFP via Getty Images
A police officer of unit RAID holds a position in an anti-riot vehicle in Lille | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
A firefighter looks on as vehicles burn following riots in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre | Zakaria Abdelkafi/AFP via Getty Images
An office of French bank Credit Mutuel burning following riots in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre | Zakaria Abdelkafi/AFP via Getty Images
Fireworks explode as policemen stand by during protests in Roubaix | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
A pedestrian walks past placards reading “justice for Nahel and for all the others killed by police” in Marseille | Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images
An RATP Transport worker walks past a burnt tram destroyed during protests in Clamart, southwest of Paris | Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images
Burnt buses at the Fort d’Aubervilliers bus terminal in Aubervilliers, north of Paris |Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images
A damaged National police station sign in the Chatelet neighbourhood in Rouen | Lou Benoist/AFP via Getty Images
The graffitis read: “27.06.2023 start of the war / a good cop is a dead cop / justice for Nahel” | Zakaria Abdelkafi/AFP via Getty Images
Police officers stand inside the burnt Hotel du ville in Garges-les-Gonesse | Stefano Rellandini/AFP via Getty Images
Fireworks explode during protests in Nanterre, west of Paris | Zakaria Abdelkafi/AFP via Getty Images
A police officer of unit RAID helps an injured man during protests in Lille | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
A police officer of unit RAID helps a passer by to cross the street during protests in Lille | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty Images
French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne speaks with a resident in front of the burnt facade of the Hotel du ville in Garges-les-Gonesse, north of Paris, following riots two days after a 17-year-old boy was shot in the chest by police | Stefano Rellandini/AFP via Getty Images
French riot police charge during clashes after a memorial march for French teenager Nahel | Abdulmonam Eassa/ Getty Images
A French riot police officer pushes back a non identified man during clashes in Nanterre | Abdulmonam Eassa/ Getty Images
<img src="https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-loaded/v1/oS4yzlmmpHZdc5gGKGTUAXn9ye8UNv30" border=0 width="1" height="1" alt="The quiet radicalism of Justice Souter" title="The quiet radicalism of Justice Souter"> <p><em>This article is <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/category/tributes-to-justice-david-souter/">part of a series</a> on the legacy and jurisprudence of the late Justice David Souter. </em></p> <p><em>Charles Barzun is a Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, where he teaches Constitutional Law, Evidence, Jurisprudence, and Torts. He is currently working on a book on the American common law tradition. </em></p> <p>I met Justice Souter only once, in the summer of 2019. He agreed to meet with me to discuss the ideas in a law review <a href="https://www.virginialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/104VaLRev655.pdf">article</a> I had written about his judicial philosophy. When I arrived to meet him for lunch at a restaurant in Concord, N.H., he was already there, waiting for me. It turned out we were the restaurant’s only customers that afternoon. Our conversation lasted about two and a half hours, touching on everything from Souter’s time as a New Hampshire trial judge to the philosophy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.</p> <span id="more-528662"></span> <p>In the obituaries following his death on May 8, Souter has been described as a temperamentally moderate, “common law” judge. Although appointed by a Republican president, he famously frustrated conservatives and was also <a href="https://balkin.blogspot.com/2016/05/abandoning-defensive-crouch-liberal.html">criticized</a> by liberals for practicing a “defensive-crouch” approach to constitutional interpretation. No doubt his quiet and unassuming personal manner only further confirmed his reputation for caution and moderation. </p> <p>That description is not wrong. But it is incomplete. For there was a lurking radicalism in Souter’s brand of common law judicial philosophy. I do not mean radical in the political sense, but rather in a deeper, jurisprudential sense. Souter recognized more openly than many judges today the way in which legal reasoning and often-changing social values are dependent on one another. </p> <p>One can catch a glimpse of this aspect of Souter’s philosophy in some of his most famous opinions. In these opinions, Souter broke free of some of the conventional norms governing Supreme Court argument, often adopting the voice less of a judge than that of a historian or sociologist. Consider a few examples: </p> <p>In his 1997 opinion for the court in <em><a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/519/172/">Old Chief v. United States</a></em> interpreting the Federal Rules of Evidence, Souter offered an expansive view of what counts as “relevant” evidence at trial. <strong>“</strong>A syllogism is not a story,” he observed, so prosecutors are permitted to introduce facts that establish the “human significance” of the facts of the crime. Some evidence-law <a href="https://repository.uclawsf.edu/hastings_law_journal/vol49/iss2/11/">scholars</a> accused Souter of licensing the introduction of prejudicial evidence, pure and simple.</p> <p>In his long dissent in <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/517/44/#tab-opinion-1959855"><em>Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida</em></a>, Souter took a similarly broad view of relevance when it came to traditional legal reasoning. So much so, in fact, that Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for the majority, chastised Souter for doing a “disservice to the Court’s traditional method of adjudication.” The chief was referring to Souter’s argument that an 1890 Supreme Court decision lacked precedential authority because what had really explained its holding that Louisiana was immune from suit was the court’s inability to enforce its own judgments in the post-Reconstruction South, not the <em>legal</em> reasons the court had offered in its written opinion. </p> <p>Finally, in the most controversial opinion he helped author, <em><a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/505/833/">Planned Parenthood v. Casey</a></em>, which upheld “the central holding” of <em><a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/113/">Roe v. Wade</a></em>, Souter authored the part of the decision that explained why <em><a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/163/537/">Plessy v. Ferguson</a></em> (upholding segregation) had been properly overruled but why <em>Roe</em> should not be. Souter contended that while societal understandings of race had shifted dramatically between <em>Plessy</em> and <em>Brown</em>, no comparable transformation had occurred regarding the facts surrounding abortion since <em>Roe.</em></p> <p>Although these cases span different areas of the law, they are all united by a common thread. Souter was convinced that when we reason through hard legal questions (whether as lawyers, judges, or citizens), our assessment of the relevant facts and legal principles reflects our values, and our values reflect the society in which we live. On this view, social change, moral values, and legal reasoning all interact with one another. </p> <p>That view does not entail moral relativism since not every societal shift reflects a gain in understanding. But it does mean that law admits of no absolutes because everything is potentially revisable in light of future experience. As Souter once put it in a commencement <a href="https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/05/text-of-justice-david-souters-speech/">speech</a>, there are “no resolutions immune to rethinking when the significance of old facts may have changed in the changing world.”</p> <p>At a time when most current Supreme Court justices, and many federal appellate judges, profess fidelity to originalism, such frank acknowledgement of the constitutional consequences of societal change by members of the federal judiciary is increasingly rare (though it has not disappeared <a href="https://www.law.nyu.edu/news/david-barron-madison-lecture-2022">completely</a>). When the court made its momentous decision to overrule <em>Roe</em> in <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/597/19-1392/#tab-opinion-4600822"><em>Dobbs v. Jackon Women’s Health Organization</em></a>, it did not do so on the ground that our understanding of the facts had changed. It held that <em>Roe</em> had always been wrong. </p> <p>I must admit, I find it hard not to hunger for absolutes these days, when the Constitution seems to be undergoing a 24/7 stress test. But it is during precisely such times that the recognition of our dependence on societal understandings is so important. For liberty only lasts as long as people want it and know how to hold onto it. That’s why it was in the context of a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=320&v=rWcVtWennr0&feature=youtu.be">discussion</a> in 2012 on the failings of civic education that Souter made a comment that would later seem so prescient: “The day will come when somebody will come forward and we and the government will in effect say ‘take the ball and run with it,’ ‘do what you have to do.’ That is the way democracy dies.” </p> <p>As we were leaving lunch that day (after telling me that he had enjoyed my “interrogation”), I asked the justice if we might persuade him to come down to Charlottesville to give a talk at the law school sometime. He said that was doubtful because he did not travel much. But then he added, with a wry smile, “But there are no absolutes.”</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/05/the-quiet-radicalism-of-justice-souter/">The quiet radicalism of Justice Souter</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com">SCOTUSblog</a>.</p>
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