January 31, 2006 – Samuel Alito Begins Service as SCOTUS Associate Justice

Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. was born on April 1, 1950 in Trenton, New Jersey. Alito was class valedictorian in high school, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1972. Alito then attended Yale Law School, where he served as an editor on the Yale Law Journal and earned a Juris Doctor in 1975.

Justice Samuel Alito

Alito clerked for a Third Circuit appeals judge in Newark, New Jersey in 1976 and 1977, and between 1977 and 1981, Alito was Assistant United States Attorney, District of New Jersey.

Beginning in 1981, Alito occupied a number of legal posts including Assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General, Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel and United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey.

As adjunct professor at Seton Hall University School of Law in Newark from 1999 to 2004, Alito taught courses in constitutional law and an original course on terrorism and civil liberties. In 1995, he was presented with the school’s Saint Thomas More Medal “in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the field of law”. On May 25, 2007, he delivered the commencement address at Seton Hall Law’s commencement ceremony and received an honorary law degree from the school.

Alito is an active member of the Federalist Society, a group of conservatives, libertarian lawyers, and legal students interested in promoting extremely conservative legal values.

On February 20, 1990, George H. W. Bush nominated Alito to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He was confirmed by unanimous consent in the Senate on April 27, 1990.

On July 1, 2005, Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement from the Supreme Court effective upon the confirmation of a successor. President George W. Bush submitted Alito’s nomination to the Senate on November 10. Alito’s confirmation hearing was held from January 9 to 13, 2006. On January 24, his nomination was voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on a 10–8 party line vote.

Debate on the nomination began in the full Senate on January 25. After a failed filibuster attempt by Senator John Kerry, the Senate confirmed Alito to the Supreme Court on January 31 by a vote of 58–42, with four Democratic senators voting for confirmation and one Republican and one Independent voting against. Thus on this day in history, Alito became the 110th justice, the second Italian-American to serve on the Court after Antonin Scalia, and the 11th Catholic in the history of the Supreme Court. He was also the fifth Catholic on the Court at the time he assumed office.

Steven G. Calabresi and Todd W. Shaw, writing for the George Washington Law Review in 2019, argue that three themes characterize Alito’s jurisprudence:

(1) a fact-oriented approach in which fact is distinct from doctrine; (2) an implementation of ‘inclusive originalism,’ under which a judge may evaluate precedent, policy, or practice, but only if the original meaning of the constitutional text incorporates such modalities; and (3) a strong presumption in favor of precedent and historical practice.”

Brianne J. Gorod, Chief Counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, maintained, in a 2017 Yale Law Journal article, that “there is no one to his right on the current Court. The current Supreme Court includes a number of conservative Justices. But even when compared with them, Justice Alito is the most consistently conservative.”

Of course, it remains to be seen if his “standing” will be maintained versus the Trump Court appointments. In particular, they all, like Justice Alito, might be receptive to what Yale Law School Professor Linda Greenhouse has called “grievance conservatism” – i.e., the belief by conservatives that the government is stomping all over the rights of Christians and their churches.

She maintained that Alito’s belief in this regard “is having a decided effect on free-exercise doctrine, with major implications.” For example, she avers:

Alito’s persecution complex is most acute when it comes to same-sex marriage. He was a vigorous dissenter from the Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision, which recognized same-sex marriage as a constitutional right. In his dissenting opinion, he summoned a dystopian world where those who clung to the traditional view of marriage would be driven underground, outcasts from society’s new order. The decision ‘will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,’ he warned.”

Elsewhere Professor Greenhouse wrote that Justice Alito, by elevating the conscience of the individual over the well-being of the collective, is threatening, along with his conservative colleagues, the foundation of civil society.

Supreme Court in June, 2021

Conservative lawyers, on the other hand, are thrilled with Alito, giving him a standing ovation at the Federalist Society in November, 2022 for his role in helping to overturn “a federal constitutional right to abortion that had been recognized for nearly half a century.” At that same meeting, Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo, who guided Trump’s selection process for Supreme Court justices, observed:

After 40 years, our successes have proliferated and our mission is more important and urgent than ever,” he said. “It’s great to celebrate this milestone. Let’s equality rededicate ourselves to spreading the principles and practices we hold dear and, together, for the sake of our country and culture, let’s make this mighty oak and all around it even stronger still.”

An astute analysis by Margaret Talbot of Alito’s agenda-driven jurisprudence and his disregard for the consequences among the victims of his culture war is in this 2022 New Yorker article.