The Legal Times has a profile of Judge Alito with a very interesting passage:

  According to at least one former Alito clerk, Nora Demleitner, [Alito] is not the rabid conservative he's so far been made out to be. Demleitner cites Alito's majority decision in the 1993 case Fatin v. INS, in which Alito held that an Iranian woman could be granted asylum if she could show that complying with her country's "gender specific laws and repressive social norms" would be deeply abhorrent to her.
  "To this day, it remains one of the most progressive opinions in asylum law on gender-based persecution," says Demleitner.
  A law professor at Hofstra University who clerked for Alito from 1992 to 1993, Demleitner said she and her former clerks are scratching their heads at the appellation "Scalito," which news reports say is Alito's nickname, and which plays into the notion that Alito is a carbon copy of Justice Antonin Scalia.
  "The only thing we can think of is demographics," she says. "They're both Italian Catholics from Trenton.
  "He's not an originalist; that's the most important thing. I don't see him saying, 'As the Framers said in 1789,' the way Scalia writes his opinions," adds Demleitner, who says she's a liberal Democrat. "I was listening to one reporter this morning and I thought she was describing Attila the Hun and not Sam Alito."