Path to the Supreme Court
The nickname arrived before he did. 'Scalito,' the legal press had tagged him years before President Bush announced the nomination, and the shorthand did a career's worth of damage in four syllables: it cast the 110th justice as a smaller copy of the 103rd, an Italian American conservative from Trenton standing in the shadow of the one from Queens. Neither man cared for it, and the record has spent two decades refuting it. Antonin Scalia (§103) was a theorist who followed his method wherever it went, to flag burners, criminal defendants, and confrontation-clause reversals that delighted the public defenders' bar. Samuel Alito has almost never been carried anywhere he did not already intend to go. His conservatism is a matter of results patiently reached, case by case, with a prosecutor's eye for the record and a suspicion of grand interpretive machinery, his own side's included. The most consistently conservative member of the modern Court, he is also its least imitative. The label got the ethnicity right and the jurisprudence wrong.
Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. was born in Trenton, New Jersey, on April 1, 1950, and raised in suburban Hamilton Township. His father, born Salvatore Alati in the Calabrian village of Saline Joniche and brought to America as a child, taught high school and then served from 1952 to 1984 as the first director of New Jersey's Office of Legislative Services, the nonpartisan bureau that drafts the legislature's bills; his mother, Rose, was a schoolteacher. It was a household of modest means and exacting standards, and the son repaid it: valedictorian of Steinert High School in 1968, then Princeton, where the class of 1972 met the campus revolution head on. When his draft lottery number came up 32, he joined Army ROTC; radicals firebombed the ROTC offices in May 1970, the trustees expelled the program from campus, and he finished his training at Trenton State College. He chaired the debate panel of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society, led a student task force on privacy that recommended, among other things, the abolition of laws criminalizing sodomy, and wrote his senior thesis on the Italian Constitutional Court after a summer's research in Rome and Bologna. His yearbook entry made the ambition public a third of a century early: 'Sam intends to go to law school and eventually to warm a seat on the Supreme Court.'
Yale Law School followed, an editorship on the Yale Law Journal, and the class of 1975. He clerked in Newark for Judge Leonard Garth of the Third Circuit, the court he would later join, and spent four years as an assistant United States attorney in New Jersey. Then came Washington and the Reagan administration's legal engine room: four years arguing for the Solicitor General, twelve cases before the Supreme Court in all, and two as a deputy in the Office of Legal Counsel. The 1985 application he wrote for that promotion became, twenty years later, the most quarreled-over document of his confirmation. 'I am and always have been a conservative,' he told the personnel office, tracing his views to National Review and the Goldwater campaign, and he was 'particularly proud' of his work on 'recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.' He also listed membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a group known for its hostility to coeducation and affirmative action at the university, an entry that would cost him dearly under oath. In 1985 he married Martha-Ann Bomgardner, a law librarian he had met during his clerkship years; they raised a son and a daughter. In 1987, at thirty-seven, he became United States Attorney for New Jersey, hiring Michael Chertoff as his deputy and absorbing the office's defeats along with its victories, including the collapse of an inherited twenty-defendant mob prosecution whose jury acquitted everyone after one of the longest federal criminal trials then on record.
President George H. W. Bush nominated him to the Third Circuit on February 20, 1990, and the Senate confirmed him by unanimous consent that April, a fact worth pausing over in light of what came later. He served fifteen years. The opinion that followed him everywhere was a dissent: in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1991 he voted to uphold Pennsylvania's requirement that a married woman notify her husband before an abortion, reasoning that the provision imposed no undue burden on most of the women it touched. The Supreme Court disagreed the next year in the joint opinion that Sandra Day O'Connor (§102) helped write. History rarely arranges its ironies so neatly: it was O'Connor's seat he was chosen to fill, and her abortion jurisprudence his most famous opinion would erase.
The 2005 vacancy reached him third-hand. O'Connor announced her retirement in July; John Roberts (§109) was nominated to her seat, then moved up to Chief Justice on Rehnquist's death; Harriet Miers, the White House counsel, was nominated next and withdrew under conservative fire on October 27. Four days later Bush named Alito. The hearings in January 2006 ran to some 700 questions over eighteen hours, and their emotional center was the item from the 1985 application: pressed repeatedly on Concerned Alumni of Princeton, he testified that he had no recollection of any active involvement, and as Senator Lindsey Graham apologized to him for the insinuations, his wife left the hearing room in tears. The Judiciary Committee split 10 to 8 on party lines. Senators John Kerry and Edward Kennedy mounted a filibuster, Kerry issuing the call from the World Economic Forum in Davos, and it failed, 72 to 25, on the cloture vote. On January 31, 2006, the Senate confirmed him 58 to 42, the narrowest successful confirmation since Clarence Thomas (§106) in 1991. He was sworn in that afternoon: the 110th justice, and the second Italian American to sit.
On the Supreme Court
Replacing O'Connor with Alito moved the Court more than any other single substitution of the era, and the docket registered it quickly. His majority opinion in Ledbetter v. Goodyear (2007) held that a woman paid less than her peers for years had filed her discrimination claim too late; Ruth Bader Ginsburg (§107) read her dissent from the bench and invited Congress to answer, and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act became the first bill President Obama signed. The exchange set a pattern: Alito reading statutes and precedents tightly, his critics answering in other forums. The major assignments came steadily. He wrote McDonald v. Chicago (2010), extending the Second Amendment to the states; Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), exempting closely held religious employers from the contraceptive mandate; Janus v. AFSCME (2018), ending compelled union fees for public workers and overruling a forty-one-year precedent; and Murphy v. NCAA (2018), striking down the federal ban on state-authorized sports betting. When President Obama criticized the Citizens United ruling to the justices' faces at the 2010 State of the Union, cameras caught Alito shaking his head and mouthing 'not true.' He never attended another.
His free-speech record complicates the caricature. Twice in successive terms he dissented alone from 8 to 1 First Amendment rulings, defending a federal ban on animal-cruelty videos and then a grieving father's verdict against the funeral picketers of Westboro Baptist Church. 'Our profound national commitment to free and open debate is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case,' he wrote in Snyder v. Phelps (2011), and closed: 'In order to have a society in which public issues can be openly and vigorously debated, it is not necessary to allow the brutalization of innocent victims like petitioner. I therefore respectfully dissent.' The same insistence on human particulars over doctrinal geometry drove his sharpest methodological quarrel, with a fellow conservative. When Neil Gorsuch (§113) read Title VII to protect gay and transgender employees in Bostock (2020), Alito's dissent spared nothing: 'The Court attempts to pass off its decision as the inevitable product of the textualist school of statutory interpretation championed by our late colleague Justice Scalia, but no one should be fooled. The Court's opinion is like a pirate ship. It sails under a textualist flag, but what it actually represents is a theory of statutory interpretation that Justice Scalia excoriated.'
Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization was the summit, and it arrived twice. On May 2, 2022, Politico published his draft majority opinion, the first full draft ever to become public while a case was pending; the marshal's investigation never identified the source. The final opinion of June 24 said what the draft had said: 'Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.' 'It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people's elected representatives.' Thirty-one years after his Casey dissent, the judge overruled the case that had overruled him.
The later controversies belong to the record, and this chapter records them as the record states them. In 2023, ProPublica reported an undisclosed 2008 Alaska fishing trip aboard a private jet provided by the businessman Paul Singer; Alito answered in a Wall Street Journal essay, published before the article ran, that the personal-hospitality exemption covered the trip and that no recusal had been required. In May 2024 the New York Times reported that an upside-down American flag, a symbol carried by 2020 election protesters, had flown at his Virginia home on January 17, 2021, and that an Appeal to Heaven flag had flown at his New Jersey beach house in the summer of 2023, while January 6 cases were pending. Senate Democrats demanded his recusal. He declined by letter, writing that his wife had raised the flags amid a dispute with neighbors and that he had played no part: 'My wife is fond of flying flags. I am not.' House critics filed a censure resolution; no recusal followed, and he sat in the January 6 cases.
The numbers describe a justice whose direction has never wavered. By the Supreme Court Database's coding, as computed for this site, he has cast a liberal vote in 34.3 percent of more than 1,400 cases against a 50.8 percent average for the colleagues who sat on the same cases, a gap of more than sixteen points, while dissenting at 17.8 percent, right at his era's norm. His circuit-era ideology score (JuDJIS +0.63) ranks 13th of 451 measured federal appellate careers; among his colleagues' circuit records, only the Chief Justice's scores higher. This site's coding of the 2025 term catches the whole profile at once: six opinions of the Court, including four of the term's six-to-three decisions, Louisiana v. Callais and Mullin v. Al Otro Lado among them, more than any colleague; eight authored dissents, two of them solo; and a vote in dissent in the tariff case, where he joined Kavanaugh (§114) against a Republican administration's signature economic program. In March 2025, when the Court refused to block a nearly two-billion-dollar foreign-aid payment order, he wrote for the four dissenters, 'I am stunned,' a sentence whose target, as the Barrett chapter (§115) recounts, was as much his newest colleague as the lower court.
At seventy-six, with only Thomas his senior, he is the subject of an annual retirement watch: commentators urging him out while a friendly Senate remains, a news report of his retirement retracted within minutes, and the justice himself telling an interviewer in August 2026, 'Obviously I'm here for another term.' Whenever the seat does open, the old shorthand will need revising. He was never Scalia's echo. He built something narrower and arguably harder to move: the most reliable conservative vote of his generation, wrapped around an idiosyncratic core that mistrusts theory, remembers the victims in the record, and keeps its own counsel. He continues to serve.
The Voting Record
How Alito voted in the 1,417 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 2005 term through the 2024 term, using that database’s classification of each vote as liberal or conservative. The gold tick on each bar is the rate for the other justices sitting on those same cases.
Across the whole career Alito voted with Thomas more than with anyone else — the same side of the judgment in 76.9% of their 775 divided cases — and with Sotomayor least, at 26.0%. See the matrices →Compared against the 9 colleagues Alito shared at least 300 divided cases with.
And Alito ended 4.1 points more conservative relative to those colleagues than at the start — the 22nd-largest shift of the 27 justices with a long enough record to measure. See who changed →
How conservative is Alito? The full ideology profile: the record measured, the bloc mapped, and the 14 cases where Alito broke from it.
Source · The Supreme Court Database (Spaeth, Epstein, Nelson, Martin, et al.) · how these figures are made
Key Decisions
Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization
2022Holding · The Constitution confers no right to abortion; Roe was 'egregiously wrong from the start,' and the question returns to the states.
Role · Alito wrote for the Court.
The most consequential decision of the twenty-first century so far — the culmination of a fifty-year campaign to overturn Roe.
Read the opinion →Janus v. AFSCME
2018Holding · The First Amendment bars public-sector unions from collecting agency fees from nonconsenting employees, overruling the 41-year-old Abood precedent.
Role · Alito wrote for the Court, 5–4.
The capstone of his decade-long campaign against compelled union fees, trailed in his own earlier opinions in Knox and Harris.
Read the opinion →Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores
2014Holding · Closely held for-profit corporations with religious objections may opt out of the contraceptive-coverage requirement under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Role · Alito wrote for the Court.
A landmark of the modern religious-liberty expansion, extending conscience protections to businesses.
Read the opinion →McDonald v. City of Chicago
2010Holding · The Second Amendment applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause.
Role · Alito wrote the plurality opinion.
Carried Heller (§103) to the states, a foundational piece of the modern gun-rights architecture later extended in Bruen (§106).
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
Samuel Alito is the intellectual anchor of the Supreme Court's conservative wing and the author of its most far-reaching modern decision — Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which in 2022 overruled Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutional right to abortion after nearly half a century. A former Reagan-administration lawyer, federal prosecutor, and appeals-court judge nicknamed 'Scalito' for his affinity with Antonin Scalia (§103), he was appointed by George W. Bush in 2006 to replace the pivotal Sandra Day O'Connor (§102), shifting the Court measurably to the right. Where Roberts (§109) hesitates over the Court's image, Alito is the unapologetic conservative — combative in dissent, expansive on religious liberty and gun rights, skeptical of abortion and racial preferences. He wrote Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, exempting closely held religious employers from the contraception mandate, and McDonald v. Chicago, extending the Second Amendment against the states. He has no full biography; his jurisprudence is best approached through his opinions and the literature on the conservative majority he helped build. Begin with Joan Biskupic's account of that majority, then read Dobbs and the religious-liberty and gun cases.
The Bookshelf
The best single account of the conservative supermajority Alito helped build and now anchors, and the natural entry point given the absence of an Alito biography. Biskupic draws on interviews and reporting to reconstruct the internal maneuvering behind Dobbs and the other blockbuster rulings, with Alito a central figure. Fair-minded but pointed, it places his uncompromising conservatism in the context of the Court's rapid rightward turn after 2020, and it is the best available portrait of the justice at work. William Morrow.
The most consequential decision of the twenty-first century so far, and the culmination of a fifty-year campaign. Writing for the Court, Alito held that the Constitution confers no right to abortion — Roe was 'egregiously wrong from the start,' he wrote — and returned the question to the states, sweeping away Roe (§98) and Casey (§102). Hailed by opponents of abortion as a historic correction and condemned by supporters as a stripping-away of settled liberty, it transformed American law and politics overnight. Read it, and the joint dissent, as the defining constitutional rupture of the era, and judge its reasoning about history and precedent for yourself.
A landmark of the modern religious-liberty expansion. Alito held that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act allowed closely held for-profit corporations with religious objections to opt out of the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive-coverage requirement. Praised as a vindication of conscience and criticized as extending religious rights to corporations at the expense of employees, it marked a major turn in the collision between anti-discrimination and regulatory law and claims of faith — a collision that has only grown since. Read it as the fullest statement of Alito's expansive view of religious exemption.
The decision that carried Heller (§103) to the states. Two years after the Court recognized an individual right to bear arms against the federal government, Alito's plurality held that the Second Amendment applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause — making the right to keep a handgun for self-defense enforceable nationwide. A foundational piece of the modern gun-rights architecture later extended in Bruen (§106), it shows Alito building the conservative constitutional edifice case by case. Read it as the bridge between Heller and today's Second Amendment law.
The first full-length Alito biography, published in April 2026 — written with clear sympathy (Hemingway is a Federalist editor and co-author of the Kavanaugh book on his colleague's shelf), which readers should weigh; a critical or scholarly life does not yet exist. Until one does, this is the book of record on the author of Dobbs. Basic Liberty.
Two New York Times reporters' deeply sourced history of the movement that ended Roe — with Alito as the justice who wrote the opinion and weathered the leak. The Dobbs context a sympathetic biography won't supply; read the two against each other. Flatiron Books.
The standard modern biographical encyclopedia of the Court: a signed essay on each of the 110 justices from Jay to Alito, alphabetically arranged, by a named scholar or journalist. Length tracks reputation — two pages for Thomas Johnson, three for Woods, eleven for Holmes — which is itself a rough map of who the literature has bothered with. It is not a substitute for a biography, and for the justices who have never had one it is often the most careful short account in print. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.
The Reading Path
A researched route through the literature — in order.
- 1.Biskupic, Nine Black Robes — for the conservative majority he anchors, and how it works
- 2.Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Org. — for the decision that overruled Roe, in his own hand
- 3.Burwell v. Hobby Lobby — for his expansive view of religious liberty
- 4.McDonald v. City of Chicago — for the Second Amendment carried to the states
Where the Papers Are Kept
Alito continues to serve, and his judicial papers are not open to researchers. His jurisprudence is documented in the Court's published opinions, and the internal deliberations of his era survive for now chiefly in reporting and in colleagues' open collections at the Library of Congress. His earlier career is documented in the Reagan-administration records at the National Archives, which include his memoranda as a Justice Department lawyer. The Federal Judicial Center and Oyez provide the biographical and case record. Visit →
Ideas for Further Research
- The end of Roe. Dobbs undid a precedent that had stood for forty-nine years and had been expressly reaffirmed in Casey. Study Alito's treatment of stare decisis — his argument that some precedents are so 'egregiously wrong' they must go — against the reliance interests and institutional-stability concerns the dissent emphasized, and ask what Dobbs implies for the durability of other long-settled rights the same reasoning might reach.
- Religious liberty ascendant. From Hobby Lobby onward, Alito has been the Court's leading voice for expansive protection of religious exercise, often where it collides with anti-discrimination law or regulatory schemes. Trace the arc of the religious-liberty cases he has shaped, and ask how courts should mediate between sincere claims of conscience and the competing rights of third parties — employees, customers, and the public — that exemptions can burden.
- The justice and the ethics debate. Alito has been at the center of recent controversies over the Court's ethics — reporting of gifts and travel, flags flown at his homes, and questions of recusal — that have fueled calls for a binding code of conduct. Examine the arguments on all sides about judicial ethics and accountability at the Supreme Court, and ask what mechanisms, if any, can secure public confidence without compromising judicial independence. Seat lineage: Sandra Day O'Connor §102 → Samuel Alito → (still serving).