ustice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has served on the US Supreme Court for 20 years, but has never gotten the attention—or credit—he deserves. Alito was nominated to the Court by President George W. Bush in 2005 to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of the moderate Sandra Day O’Connor, after Bush initially selected Harriet Miers, his little-known White House counsel, for the slot. (Miers was quickly forced to withdraw due to broad-based opposition over her lack of qualifications.) By then selecting Alito, a 15-year veteran on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, Bush 43 did the nation a huge favor. Not only was Alito a vast improvement over Miers, his nomination also atoned for Bush 41’s disastrous appointment of David Souter, who proved over the course of his 19 years on the Court to be a closet liberal. Not Alito, who has been a conservative stalwart on the Court for two decades.
Alito long labored in the shadow of extrovert Antonin Scalia and jurisprudential maverick Clarence Thomas, who has been credited with rediscovering the “lost Constitution.” Unlike some of his attention-seeking colleagues, such as the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who was celebrated by her acolytes as the “Notorious RBG”) and Grammys-attending Ketanji Brown Jackson, Alito judiciously maintains a low profile. He may be the least publicly recognizable justice—the opposite of a celebrity. Alito does not crave the spotlight; in fact, he has not attended a State of the Union address since 2010, when he was criticized for seeming to mouth the words “not true” when President Obama falsely—and inappropriately—accused the Court of having overruled “a century of law” in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), which had been decided a few days earlier.
Ironically, Alito’s reserved demeanor, while methodically rolling back the doctrinal excesses of prior activist eras on the Court, may have led him to become the target of baseless attacks by liberal critics who mistake his plainspoken persona as weakness. Or perhaps the reason why Scalia was spared the abuse directed at Alito is that during Scalia’s tenure on the Court, he was a fiery dissenter, whereas Alito—now part of a long-awaited 6-to-3 conservative majority—is penning majority decisions overturning precedents sacred to the Left, such as Roe v. Wade.
In any event, Alito’s lack of public recognition is about to change. Mollie Hemingway, well-known center-right journalist and best-selling co-author of an excellent account of the tortuous confirmation process inflicted on Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, Justice on Trial, has written the first biography of Alito, entitled Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution. In this decidedly friendly book, Hemingway makes the case that Alito is one of the most consequential jurists in the twenty-first century—the most consistent, and influential, conservative voice on the Court.
Hemingway’s research for Alito was characteristically thorough. As in Rigged, her best-selling account of the 2020 election, she conducted extensive interviews—nearly 100 people, some for multiple sessions—most of them conducted “on background.” The interviewees included “Supreme Court justices, federal judges, United States Senators, high-ranking former White House and cabinet officials, state legal executives, Supreme Court advocates, law professors, former clerks, permanent staff of the Supreme Court, legal activists, and childhood friends and family of Justice Alito.” In addition to the extensive interviews, Hemingway consulted with legal scholars, pored over the Court’s decisions, and reviewed the essays presented at a symposium on Justice Alito’s jurisprudence held in March 2022, which were published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.
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