The Tuesday New York Times has a very good profile of Judge Alito that I think captures him pretty well. An excerpt:
Judge Alito’s jurisprudence has been methodical, cautious, respectful of precedent and solidly conservative, legal scholars said. In cases involving the great issues of the day – abortion, the death penalty and the separation of church and state – Judge Alito has typically taken the conservative side.
Yet he has not flaunted his political views inside or outside the courthouse. Friends say Judge Alito seems to have inherited a distaste for shows of ideology from his father, an Italian immigrant who became research director for the New Jersey Legislature and had to rigorously avoid partisanship.
Judge Alito won prestigious academic prizes while at Princeton and Yale Law School, where he stood out for his conservative views, which were in the minority, as well as for his civility in engaging ideological opponents.
“The notion that he’s an extreme conservative is wrong,” said Mark Dwyer, Judge Alito’s fellow student at Princeton and roommate at Yale. “Sam is conservative because he’s a straightforward believer in judicial restraint – that is, a judge’s personal views should not dictate the outcome of the case.”
Even in the Reagan Justice Department, where a palpable sense of conservative triumph was in the air, “I never got the sense that he thought about legal issues in an ideological way,” said Mr. Manning, now a professor at Harvard Law School.
Read the whole thing.
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