ALITO l Deference to the state, police
sue. As a young lawyer in the Reagan administration in 1985, he did advocate overturning the landmark abortion ruling. But it’s his record in matters that routinely come before the Supreme Court that suggests he would be more reliably conservative than Sandra Day O’Connor, the justice he would replace.
Liberal and conservative supporters alike describe the quiet, scholarly Alito as a restrained judge who follows the law, not his personal beliefs. Those who have worked closely with him, including former law clerks and fellow judges, say they can’t think of a case in which he took a partisan political stance.
‘‘As you can probably glean from his opinions, he’s a conservative,’’ said former 3rd Circuit Judge Timothy Lewis, a more liberal judge who served with Alito from 1992 to 2000 and supports the nomination. ‘‘I’m very comfortable with his judicial philosophy, though it was very different than mine. It only works if the judge doesn’t have an agenda. He is not result-oriented.’’
Alito’s voluminous judicial record, however, puts him among the nation’s most conservative judges.
‘‘Alito is more conservative than O’Connor; this isn’t a hard question,’’ said Rory Little, a Hastings College of the Law professor in San Francisco and a former Supreme Court clerk who praised Alito’s credentials. ‘‘This isn’t a guy who is going to vote in a way that will make anybody on the left happy.’’
A review of Alito’s work on dozens of cases that raised important social issues found that he rarely supports individualclaims.
The primary exception has been his opinions about First Amendment protections. Alito has been a near absolutist on free speech, and he has been equally strong on protecting religious freedoms.
But even some of his First Amendment opinions underscore the bent in the rest of his work. He has not strictly enforced church-state separation, and his love of the First Amendment seems to stop at the prison walls. He has written opinions that would deny prisoners access to reading materials and curtail their rights to practice their religious beliefs.
In other areas, Alito often goes out of his way to narrow the scope of individual rights, sometimes reaching out to undo lower-court rulings that affirmed those rights. In one notable ruling, Alito snatched a lower-court victory from a group of diabetic inmates who alleged their jailers didn’t adequately treat their illness.