Justice David H. Souter has in the past avoided the limelight. But in a speech yesterday at Georgetown Law Center decrying Americans’ lack of civic knowledge, the retiring justice demonstrated his speaking prowess.

Souter warned that the republic "can be lost, it is being lost, it is lost, if it is not understood,” the National Law Journal reports. He cited surveys showing about two-thirds of Americans can’t even name the three branches of government, one of the basic lessons he learned as a youth at town hall meetings in Weare, N.H., according to the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal Law Blog.