60 Facts About Samuel Alito

Samuel Alito was nominated to the high court by President George W Bush on October 31,2005, and has served on it since January 31,2006.

Samuel Alito was raised in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, and graduated from Princeton University and Yale Law School.

In 1990, Samuel Alito was appointed as a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, where he served until joining the Supreme Court.

Samuel Alito has called himself a "practical originalist" and is a member of the Supreme Court's conservative bloc.

Samuel Alito's father earned a master's degree at Rutgers University and was a high school teacher and later the first director of the New Jersey Office of Legislative Services, a state government position he held from 1952 to 1984.

Samuel Alito grew up in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, a suburb of Trenton.

Samuel Alito attended Steinert High School, where he graduated in 1968 as the class valedictorian, subsequently matriculating at Princeton University.

At Princeton, Samuel Alito chaired a student conference in 1971 called "The Boundaries of Privacy in American Society", which supported curbs on domestic intelligence gathering and anticipated the need for a statute and a court to oversee national security surveillance.

Samuel Alito led the American Whig-Cliosophic Society's Debate Panel during his time at Princeton.

Samuel Alito avoided Princeton's eating clubs, joining Stevenson Hall instead.

In December 1969, while a sophomore at Princeton, Samuel Alito received a low lottery number of 32 in the Selective Service drawing.

Samuel Alito became a member of the school's Army ROTC program.

Samuel Alito was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army Reserve in 1972.

Samuel Alito began his military duty after graduating from law school in 1975 and served on active duty from September to December while attending the Signal Officer Basic Course at Fort Gordon, Georgia.

Samuel Alito was promoted to first lieutenant and captain, and completed his service obligation as a member of the inactive reserve before being honorably discharged in 1980.

At Princeton, Alito was "almost alone" in his familiarity with the writings of John Marshall Harlan II and was much influenced by the course on constitutional interpretation taught by Walter F Murphy, his faculty adviser.

Samuel Alito then attended Yale Law School, where he served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal and earned a Juris Doctor in 1975.

Samuel Alito interviewed with Supreme Court Justice Byron White for a clerkship but was not hired.

Between 1977 and 1981, Samuel Alito was Assistant United States Attorney, District of New Jersey.

From 1981 to 1985, Alito was Assistant to US Solicitor General Rex E Lee.

Samuel Alito lost only two of the cases he argued before the Supreme Court.

From 1985 to 1987, Alito was Deputy Assistant Attorney General under Charles J Cooper in the Office of Legal Counsel during the tenure of Attorney General Edwin Meese.

Between 1986 and 1987, Samuel Alito authored nearly 470 pages of memoranda, in which he argued for expanding his client's law enforcement and personnel authorities.

Samuel Alito expressed concern about Warren Court decisions in the areas of criminal procedure, the Establishment Clause, and reapportionment.

From 1987 to 1990, Samuel Alito was the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey.

In March 1988, Alito sought a rehearing of extradition proceedings against two Indian men, represented by Ron Kuby, who were accused of being terrorist assassins, after Alito discovered that the death threats his prosecutor, Judy G Russell, had received had been sent to her by herself.

In 1989, Samuel Alito prosecuted a member of the Japanese Red Army for planning a terrorist bombing in Manhattan.

Samuel Alito is a member of the Federalist Society, a group of conservative and libertarian lawyers and legal students interested in conservative legal theory.

Samuel Alito was confirmed by unanimous consent in the Senate on April 27,1990, and received his commission three days later.

Samuel Alito was unanimously rated "well qualified" to fill the Associate Justice post by the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Federal Judiciary, which measures the professional qualifications of a nominee.

Samuel Alito's confirmation hearing was held from January 9 to 13,2006.

Samuel Alito responded to some 700 questions over 18 hours of testimony.

Samuel Alito rejected the use of foreign legal materials in the Constitution, did not state a position on cameras in courtrooms, said Congress could choose to outlaw LGBT employment discrimination in the United States if it wished, and told then-Senator Joe Biden that he endorsed a weak version of the unitary executive theory.

Samuel Alito professed reluctance to commit to any type of ideology, stating he would act as an impartial referee.

Samuel Alito said he would look at abortion with an open mind but would not state how he would rule on Roe v Wade if that decision were to be challenged.

Samuel Alito was sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court later that day.

Samuel Alito became the 110th justice, the second Italian-American, the 11th Catholic in the history of the Supreme Court, the fifth Catholic on the Court at the time he assumed office, and one of six on the Court as of 2024.

Samuel Alito wrote for a unanimous court in ordering a new trial for Bobby Lee Holmes due to South Carolina's rule that barred such evidence based on the strength of the prosecution's case, rather than on the relevance and strength of the defense evidence itself.

Samuel Alito further voted with the conservative wing of the court on Sanchez-Llamas v Oregon and Rapanos v United States.

Samuel Alito delivered the Supreme Court Historical Society's 2008 Annual Lecture, "The Origin of the Baseball Antitrust Exemption".

In two higher-profile cases, one involving the constitutionality of political gerrymandering and one involving campaign finance reform, Alito adopted narrow positions, declining to join the bolder positions advanced by either philosophical side of the Court.

Samuel Alito differed from Scalia in applying originalism flexibly to arrive at conservative outcomes "with plodding consistency", rather than following it so strictly as to occasionally produce outcomes unfavorable to conservatives.

Samuel Alito sided with the liberal bloc of the court, inferring protection against retaliation in the federal-sector provision of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act despite the lack of an explicit provision concerning retaliation.

In October 2020, Samuel Alito agreed with the other justices on the denial of an appeal filed by Kim Davis, a county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

On November 12,2020, Samuel Alito made headlines for comments about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Samuel Alito has called himself a "practical originalist" and is a member of the Court's conservative bloc.

Samuel Alito has been described as one of the Court's "most conservative justices".

Samuel Alito drew controversy in June 2024 when a filmmaker who had been posing as a conservative posted a secret recording in which he could be heard agreeing with her assertion that Christians should win "the moral argument" against the Left and return the country to "a place of godliness".

The membership of the Court changed after Stenberg, with Roberts and Samuel Alito replacing Rehnquist and O'Connor respectively.

On May 2,2022, Politico published a leak of a first draft of a majority opinion by Alito that circulated among the justices in February 2022 for the upcoming decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization.

In July 2022, Samuel Alito gave his first public comments on the ruling in a keynote address for Notre Dame Law School's Religious Liberty Initiative in Rome.

Samuel Alito mocked several foreign leaders for criticizing the decision, particularly UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, referencing his pending resignation, and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, who had compared the ruling to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Samuel Alito wrote that he had been informed of the outcome of Burwell v Hobby Lobby weeks before the June 2014 decision, authored by Alito and favorable to anti-abortion conservatives, was officially announced.

In 1985, Samuel Alito married Martha-Ann Bomgardner, a law librarian who met him during his trips to the library as a law clerk.

Samuel Alito resided with his family in West Caldwell, New Jersey, before his Supreme Court nomination.

Since Stephen Breyer's retirement in 2022, Samuel Alito has been the only military veteran on the Court.

Samuel Alito is a baseball fan and a longtime fan of the Philadelphia Phillies.

Shortly before publication of the Propublica article, Samuel Alito published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal challenging the article's assertions and claiming that the source "misleads its readers".

Samuel Alito further contended that because of an exemption in the Court's reporting rules for "personal hospitality", he was not required to disclose private air transport for social trips.

Samuel Alito responded that he had no involvement in hoisting either flag, saying: "I was not even aware of the upside-down flag until it was called to my attention" and "I was not familiar with the Appeal to Heaven flag when my wife flew it".