Question: When did the author of Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly start serving on the Supreme Court?

Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007) , was a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States involving antitrust law and civil procedure.  It also heightened the pleading requirement for Federal civil cases, requiring that plaintiffs include enough facts in their complaint to make it plausible—not merely possible or conceivable—that they will be able to prove facts to support their claims.  Authored by Justice David Souter, it established that parallel conduct, absent evidence of agreement, is insufficient to sustain an antitrust action under § 1 of the Sherman Act.  This latter change in the law has been met with a great deal of controversy in legal circles, evidenced by the dissenting opinion from Justice John Paul Stevens. <SEP> Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587 (1935) , was one of the cases decided by the United States Supreme Court that arose out of the trial of the Scottsboro Boys.  The Supreme Court held that the systematic exclusion of African Americans from jury service violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  The case was a significant advance in the Supreme Court's criminal procedure jurisprudence.  Building on the existing precedent of "Strauder v. West Virginia" (1880) and "Neal v. Delaware" (1882), the Supreme Court addressed an Alabama statute that was facially neutral, but held that a criminal defendant could establish a prima facie claim of discrimination by showing that a substantial number of African Americans live in a community and that African Americans have been excluded from serving on juries. <SEP>  He served from October 1990 until his retirement in June 2009. David Hackett Souter ( ; born September 17, 1939) is a retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.  Appointed by President George H. W. Bush to fill the seat vacated by William J. Brennan, Jr., Souter sat on both the Rehnquist and Roberts courts and came to vote reliably with the court's liberal members. <SEP> Ethyl Gasoline Corp. v. United States, 309 U.S. 436 (1940), was a decision of the United States Supreme Court that limited the doctrine of the Court's 1938 decision in "General Talking Pictures Corp. v. Western Electric Co." Beginning with the 1926 decision in "United States v. General Electric Co.", the Supreme Court made a sharp distinction between (i) post-sale restraints that a patentee imposed on purchasers of a patented product and (ii) restrictions (limitations) that a patentee imposed on a licensee to manufacture a patented product: the former being illegal and unenforceable under the exhaustion doctrine while the latter were generally permissible under a lenient "rule of reason."  Thus, under the "General Talking Pictures" doctrine, a patent holder may permissibly license others to "manufacture" and then sell patented products in only a specified field (market), such as only a particular type of product made under the patent or only a particular category of customer for the patented product.  The "Ethyl" decision held, however, that a patent licensing and distribution program based on both the sale of a patented product and licenses to manufacture a related product was subject to ordinary testing under the antitrust laws, and accordingly was illegal when its effect was to "regiment" an entire industry.