Who is Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito? Career, family, political views...

The US Supreme Court has nine justices. Six conservative-leaning justices, Chief Justice John G Roberts Jr., Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, and three more liberal justices, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Elena Kagan, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, have been nominated by Republican presidents.

Here, we will look at Justice Alito’s career and personal background. Justice Alito’s majority opinion overturning Roe vs Wade in 2022 led to the re-surfacing of the justice as a household name. His views on abortion, as well as those on same-sex marriage and rights to contraceptives, have created a sense of uncertainty for many whose rights could be taken away if Justice Alito’s judicial perspective is to dominate the court in the coming years.

Justice Alito under fire once again

Since mid-2023, Justice Alito has also been under increased scrutiny for his relationships with billionaires, who some outlets, like ProPublica, have argued are corrupt. Ethics complaints have been filed because justices have failed to report large gifts, paid vacations, and career assistance for families to Congress. These ‘bribes’ are considered vehicles to reward judicial decisions that favor certain causes and ideologies. Justice Alito responded to the allegations in an op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal, defending himself by playing down his relationship with billionaire Paul Singer. However, the ethics complaints took the back seat this month after a report by the New York Times found in the weeks following the January 6th attack on the Capitol, an American flag hung upside down was spotted outside Justice Alito’s home. Justice Alito’s wife, a former law librarian, Martha-Ann Alito, reportedly decided to hang the flag in such a manner, which has become a sign among those who supported the events of January 6th. Then, a few days later, more images surfaced of a beach house owned by the Alitos where the conservative nationalist “Appeal to Heaven” flag had been hanging during the summer of 2023.

For the public, the Supreme Court is supposed to be non-partisan, though it would be difficult to identify a court in US history where that is true. These blatant expressions of Alito’s political opinion threaten the court’s legitimacy for many voters, particularly those whose rights Alito can strip. Additionally, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have raised concerns over Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases involving former President Donald Trump. Justice Alito responded with a letter to members of Congress informing them that he would not recuse himself and naming his wife responsible for the presence of the flags and.

“She was solely responsible for having flagpoles put up at our residence and our vacation home and has flown a wide variety of flags over the years,” argued the Justice.

Alito’s Origins

He took his seat on the court in 2006 after being nominated by President George W. Bush. Justice Alito filled the seat left by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Justice Alito’s path to the Supreme Court follows a traditional path. He graduated from an Ivy League law school, Yale, to be specific, and then went on to clerk for a Third Circuit appeals judge, Leonard I. Garth. Justice Amy Comey-Barrett is the only current Justice not to have attended an Ivy, obtaining her Juris Doctor from the University of Notre Dame. Justices Kavanaugh, Sotomayor, and Thomas also attended Yale, while all the other justices attended Harvard University.

In the mid-1980s, during the Regan administration, Alito served as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. Furthering his conservative judicial bonafide was his membership in the Federalist Society, a right-wing organization aiming to elect conservative judges to the Supreme Court. He left his role in Washington to become the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey in 1987, where he stayed until 1990 when he was appointed as a judge to the Third Circuit, where he had clerked after finishing law school.