How Conservative Is Samuel Alito?

Same test as Thomas’s page: a divided case in which at least four of the other five Republican appointees voted together and Alito voted the other way. It almost never happens — 14 times in 119 such cases across the 2020 through 2024 terms, 11.8%, barely half Thomas’s rate. And all of them are dissents: where Jackson breaks into the majority as often as out of it, Alito has never left the bloc except to object — 3 times entirely alone, 6 times beside Thomas, 4 times with only Gorsuch, and once, in Erlinger, beside Kavanaugh and Jackson.

The direction is one-sided: the database codes 11 of the 14 conservative and only 2 liberal — and those two are standing cases (California v. Texas, United States v. Texas) where its judicial-power convention codes a vote to LET a suit proceed as liberal, even though the suits Alito would have heard were challenges to the Affordable Care Act and to federal immigration policy. Read plainly, the breaks point one way: the bloc, as he saw it, did not go far enough.

The largest cluster is structural: who gets into court, and who controls the government’s machinery. Twice he dissented alone because a state was turned away at the door — United States v. Texas, where Texas’s challenge to federal immigration priorities failed for standing, and he warned the majority was handing the Executive a sweeping non-enforcement prerogative; and California v. Texas, with Gorsuch, where the states’ challenge to the Affordable Care Act failed the same way. In CFPB v. Community Financial Services, again with Gorsuch, he read the Appropriations Clause to forbid an agency that funds itself in perpetuity. In Brackeen he alone framed the Indian Child Welfare Act as federal power overriding both state family law and the best interests of the child. Even his VanDerStok dissent is procedural — an objection to deciding the ghost-gun rule under a framework nobody briefed.

The other cluster is criminal, and it reads like the United States Attorney he was. When the majority’s categorical approach let an attempted armed robbery escape the label “crime of violence” in United States v. Taylor, Alito wrote his own dissent on what Taylor actually did. He joined Kavanaugh’s Erlinger dissent — judges may find recidivism facts, as they long have — and wrote, with Gorsuch, in Esteras that a sentencing judge cannot realistically wall off retribution. Where Thomas’s criminal-law breaks sometimes favor defendants on textual grounds and Jackson’s split both ways, Alito’s never do: across all 14 breaks, not one put him on a criminal defendant’s side of the judgment.

He has described himself as a “practical originalist” — the adjective is doing real work. The method shows in the breaks: no stare-decisis crusade like Thomas’s, no lenity like Jackson’s — the disagreements are about outcomes the bloc’s doctrines, faithfully applied, should in his view have reached.

Form separates the three justices profiled so far as cleanly as direction. Thomas breaks mostly in dissent and often alone — 52 career cases as the lone justice in the minority. Jackson breaks into the majority as often as out of it. Alito only dissents — all 14 of his breaks — but usually with company: just 3 of the 14 were solo, and his career count of lone-justice dissents is 12, a quarter of Thomas’s. His dissent rate over the whole tenure is 17.8%, almost exactly his colleagues’ 17.3% on the same cases — the profile of a justice who is usually in the majority of this Court, and who, when he is not, would rather join a dissent than write the Court a letter no one signs.

That is also what the agreement figures say about influence: the man who wrote Dobbs, Janus and Murphy v. NCAA — the opinions that overruled Roe, ended agency fees, and unleashed sports betting — does his moving inside the majority, not outside it.