Samuel Alito
Samuel Alito is an Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court, having been sworn in on January 31, 2006. Born on April 1, 1950, in Trenton, New Jersey, to Italian immigrant parents, Alito pursued a legal career after graduating from Princeton University and Yale Law School. His judicial career includes a notable tenure as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit prior to his Supreme Court appointment. Alito's confirmation process was marked by significant controversy, reflecting the polarized political climate of the time, especially concerning issues such as abortion rights, affirmative action, and civil liberties in the context of national security.
Throughout his Supreme Court tenure, Alito has predominantly aligned with conservative legal principles, often siding with fellow conservative justices on key rulings. Significant cases during his time on the Court include decisions related to abortion laws, such as the controversial Mississippi law that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and rulings affecting affirmative action and religious liberties. Alito's judicial philosophy is often shaped by his strong religious beliefs and conservative viewpoints, which have drawn both support and criticism. As discussions around judicial conduct and ethics have emerged, Alito has faced scrutiny for his personal affiliations and actions, reflecting broader debates about the integrity of the Supreme Court. He is married with two children and continues to play a significant role in shaping U.S. law and policy.
Samuel Alito
- Born: April 1, 1950
- Place of Birth: Trenton, New Jersey
On January 31, 2006, in a private ceremony, Samuel Alito was sworn in as an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court. However, Alito's confirmation process was anything but ceremonial. With the country divided over social issues and homeland security policies, Alito's nomination to replace the moderate justice Sandra Day O'Connor was highly contentious. Throughout his career on the Supreme Court, Alito has predominantly ruled along conservative lines.
Background
Samuel Alito was born on April 1, 1950, in Trenton, New Jersey. His parents, Samuel A. Alito Sr. and Rose Fadusco Alito, were Italian immigrants. Samuel Alito Sr. was a high school teacher who, when his son was only two years old, became the director of the New Jersey Office of Legislative Services. At that point, the family moved to the middle-class suburb of Hamilton Township.
In 1972, Alito graduated from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. That year, he was admitted to Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut, graduating in 1975.
In 1970, during his time at Princeton, Alito had joined the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) just as United States forces were in the process of pulling out of Vietnam. He was a member of the Army Reserve during law school, and spent three months after his graduation from Yale at Fort Gordon, Georgia, after which he remained an inactive member of the military. Alito was honorably discharged in 1980 as a captain.
Legal Career
Following his three months of active military service, Alito began his law career as a clerk for Third Circuit Judge Leonard I. Garth. A year later, he was promoted to the position of assistant United States attorney for New Jersey. There, he argued cases on appeal on behalf of the US government.
In 1981, Alito became an assistant to the solicitor general of the United States, where he again represented the federal government in federal appellate courts and, in twelve cases, before the US Supreme Court. Four years as the assistant to the solicitor general earned Alito a position in the Office of Legal Counsel in 1985. Acting as deputy assistant attorney general, Alito became one of the legal advisors on constitutional issues for the administration of President Ronald Reagan. He served as counsel for the executive branch for only two years.
In 1987, Alito returned to the district attorney's office in New Jersey, this time as US attorney. His assistant attorney was Michael Chertoff, later to serve as the secretary of homeland security during the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe.
In 1990, under George H. W. Bush's administration, Alito was nominated to serve as a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, based in Philadelphia. In 1999, while still serving on the bench, Alito also began teaching law classes at Seton Hall University as an adjunct professor.
Nomination to the Supreme Court
Alito was nominated to the United States Supreme Court on November 10, 2005. That July, Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor had sent her letter of resignation to President George W. Bush. Any nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States is fraught with political ramifications. A Court appointment is for life, so that the justices have an impact on US law and social policy long after the president who submits the nomination has left office. Justice O'Connor's retirement, however, was of particular concern.
Throughout the early twenty-first century, the Supreme Court has shifted from positions more favorable to progressive social politics and toward positions likely to benefit the more conservative Republican agenda. Throughout the years of her service, O'Connor famously represented the "swing vote." Her moderate opinions kept a degree of balance on the court between "left" and "right" political positions.
Most legal experts agreed that Alito's career and public statements placed him firmly in the conservative tradition. Nevertheless, Alito was not President Bush's first nominee. On July 20, Bush nominated US Court of Appeals judge John Roberts to fill O'Connor's seat on the Court. On September 3, 2006, however, Supreme Court chief justice William Rehnquist died suddenly after nearly nineteen years on the Court. Bush quickly moved to withdraw Roberts's nomination for associate justice and instead nominated him to fill Chief Justice Rehnquist's seat.
President Bush next nominated Harriet Miers to the associate justice seat being vacated by O'Connor. On October 27, Miers withdrew her acceptance of the nomination after objections from both political camps and the American Bar Association about her qualifications for the Supreme Court.
On October 31, President Bush announced his nomination of Samuel Alito to fill the position of associate justice. Unlike Miers, Alito had the necessary legal experience to sit on the Supreme Court. The debate about Alito's fitness for the bench revolved around a few social and political issues, such as abortion rights, affirmative action, and civil rights in times of war.
Criticism and Debate
A person's rights with regard to their own reproductive system became a federal, rather than a state, matter in the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade. In that case, the Supreme Court decided that a Texas law making abortion illegal violated a pregnant person's right to privacy, a right inferred from the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. The decision included a "trimester test" that determined that the dangers to the pregnant person's health during the first trimester of pregnancy tipped the balance toward a person's right to the private use of their body during that period, but permitted states to ban or limit their ability to obtain an abortion in later stages of pregnancy.
Following Roe v. Wade, the abortion rights issue remained one of the most emotionally volatile debates in the country. Many states retained bans or severe limitations on procedures to terminate pregnancies. In the most severe instances, some states have proposed bans that make no exceptions in cases of rape or danger to the health of the pregnant person. Beginning with the Reagan administration, Republican presidents chose Supreme Court nominees likely to overturn the 1973 case. Alito stated expressly that he believed the decision in Roe v. Wade was an incorrect use of constitutional law.
As in the abortion debate, the debate surrounding affirmative action has drawn sharp emotional responses for decades. Emerging from a set of legislative and social policies that sought to rectify the country's debilitating history of racial discrimination against Black Americans, affirmative action allows employers, schools, and government bodies to give preference to racially marginalized applicants. Shortly afterward, affirmative action policies were expanded to include women and other marginalized groups.
Even its critics agree that affirmative action has forced American society to open opportunities where none existed before. Some opponents of the policy have argued that affirmative action is no longer necessary. However, the most important argument continued to take place before the courts, which historically upheld the use of affirmative action as an exception to the equal protections clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Affirmative action proponents argued that Alito's record on the bench and as counsel demonstrated that he was opposed to this reading of the Fourteenth Amendment.
While both reproductive rights and affirmative action emerged during Samuel Alito's confirmation hearings, it was the civil rights questions that emerged with the most force. Following the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, the federal government worked to revamp and expand upon domestic security policies and techniques, often with controversial results.
President Bush's first effort at strengthening domestic security, the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001," is more commonly known as the Patriot Act. In its original form, the act permitted a far broader scope of surveillance on the American public, including the right of federal authorities to seize library records upon demand and without cause for suspicion. President Bush's administration was later forced to limit some of the powers of the original act in deference to public opinion.
However, legal and social debates continued to rage over the government's right to tap phone lines without court warrants, create databases out of private phone records, and imprison American citizens and foreign nationals without trials. In these and other instances, the Supreme Court became a central player in determining when and how the president's powers are balanced against the constitutional rights of American citizens. In this area, too, civil rights proponents feared that Alito's past legal interpretations demonstrated that he would be unwilling to use the Supreme Court as a check on the executive powers of the president.
In spite of these debates, the Senate Committee confirmed Alito as the 110th justice of the Supreme Court by a vote of 58 to 42, and he took his seat on the court on January 31, 2006. During his time on the court, Alito has continued to uphold his conservative ideals and usually agreed with other conservative members of the court. In 2015, for example, he was one of three justices who issued a dissent in the case of King v. Burwell, which allowed the federal government to continue providing health care subsidies as part of the Affordable Care Act. Alito also sided with the conservative minority in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges, which made marriage between people of the same sex legal in all states. The following year, he authored a long minority opinion in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas, in which he argued against the university's use of affirmative action in its admissions process. Alito has, however, broken away from the conservative majority in some cases, such as in Snyder v. Phelps. In that 2011 case, which concerned the Westboro Baptist Church's practice of boycotting military funerals, Alito argued against the other eight justices who voted to protect the free speech of church members, believing that the harm caused to grieving family members overruled the picketers' First Amendment rights.
Through the remainder of the 2010s and into the 2020s, Alito remained a mostly conservative force on the court. After the Supreme Court struck down a Nevada church's challenge to the state's pandemic-related restrictions in Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley v. Steve Sisolak, Governor of Nevada, et. al. (2020), Alito dissented from the majority opinion and argued that the church was being treated unfairly under existing COVID-19 protocols. In 2021, he sided with a ruling that upheld a controversial Texas abortion law referred to as the "Heartbeat Bill," which banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy and established legal mechanisms for private citizens to sue anyone who obtains or provides an abortion.
In May 2022, a draft of a majority opinion written by Alito regarding Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (which centered on the legality of a 2018 Mississippi law that banned abortion after fifteen weeks) was leaked to the press that supported both the Mississippi law and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Following nationwide protests regarding the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court reached a decision in June of that same year that upheld the Mississippi law while controversially overturning Roe v. Wade, resulting in the legality of abortion returning to the state level. As a result, many states implemented legislation to either restrict or protect access to abortion. When, in 2023, the Supreme Court decided on a case regarding affirmative action in college admissions policies, Alito agreed with the majority opinion that effectively prohibited colleges' future use of race in admissions considerations.
As media outlets increasingly reported on ethics scandals involving Supreme Court justices as well as some activists' calls for changes to the judicial body's codes of conduct, Alito attracted scrutiny in May 2024 upon revelations regarding controversial flags flown outside his homes. According to reports, flags flown at two of his properties had symbolic connections to supporters of Donald Trump and their allegations that the 2020 presidential election had been fraudulent. Subsequently citing potential bias, some demanded that Alito recuse himself from upcoming cases pertaining to the 2020 election or the attack on January 6, 2021, on the US Capitol meant to stop the election certification. In response, Alito claimed that his wife, within her rights, had chosen to display the flags and that they were not reasonable grounds for his recusal. News outlets also brought attention to his outspoken nature, especially related to his strong religious views, which have often been reflected in his written opinions of high-profile cases. A June 2024 recording of Alito at a private event that was leaked to the press further brought these views to light, revealing his conservative Catholic worldview in statements such as those calling for the country to return to a "place of godliness."
In July 2024, as critique of Alito's actions continued, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez filed articles of impeachment against both Alito and fellow Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, claiming both justices failed to disclose gifts from billionaires and to withdraw from cases in which they clearly had conflicts of interest. In September 2024, Alito and his wife came under fire again for accepting an invitation from a controversial German princess to stay at her castle. The princess also gave the Alitos $900 concert tickets to a music festival.
Personal Life
Alito married Martha-Ann Bomgardner in 1985. They have two children, Philip and Laura.
Bibliography
Astor, Maggie. "Ocasio-Cortez Files Impeachment Articles Against Justices Alito and Thomas." The New York Times, 10 July 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/07/10/us/politics/aoc-samuel-alito-clarence-thomas-impeach.html.Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.
Barnes, Robert, and Mike Bernardino. “Alito Defends Letting Texas Abortion Law Take Effect, Says Supreme Court Critics Want to Intimidate Justices.” The Washington Post, 30 Sept. 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts‗law/alito-texas-abortion-law-shadow-docket/2021/09/30/e74da5f6-2219-11ec-8200-5e3fd4c49f5e‗story.html. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.
Fritze, John. "Alito Tells Lawmakers He Will Not Recuse from Supreme Court Cases Despite Flag Controversy." CNN, 29 May 2024, www.cnn.com/2024/05/29/politics/alito-flag-controversy-response-supreme-court/index.html. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.
Hurley, Lawrence. "Secret Recording Puts Spotlight on Alito's Strong Conservative Views on Religious Issues." NBC News, 11 June 2024, www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/secret-recording-puts-spotlight-alitos-strong-conservative-views-relig-rcna156535. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.
Liptak, Adam. “In Unusually Political Speech, Alito Says Liberals Pose Threat to Liberties.” The New York Times, 13 Nov. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/us/samuel-alito-religious-liberty-free-speech.html. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.
Mangan, Dan, and Kevin Breuninger. “Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade, Ending 50 Years of Federal Abortion Rights.” CNBC, 24 Jun. 2022, www.cnbc.com/2022/06/24/roe-v-wade-overturned-by-supreme-court-ending-federal-abortion-rights.html. Accessed 8 Sept. 2022.
"Samuel Alito Fast Facts." CNN, 13 Mar. 2024, www.cnn.com/2013/02/03/us/samuel-alito-fast-facts/index.html. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.
“Samuel A. Alito, Jr.” Oyez, www.oyez.org/justices/samuel‗a‗alito‗jr. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.
VanSickle, Abbie, and Philip Kaleta. “Conservative German Princess Says She Hosted Justice Alito at Her Castle." The New York Times, 9 Sept. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/09/09/us/politics/german-princess-alito-castle-visit.html. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.