Samuel Alito

Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. (/əˈliːtoʊ/ ə-LEE-toh; born April 1, 1950) is an American jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated to the high court by President George W. Bush on October 31, 2005, and has served on it since January 31, 2006. After Antonin Scalia, Alito is the second Italian American justice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Alito was raised in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, and graduated from Princeton University and Yale Law School. After law school, he worked as an assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel and served as the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey. In 1990, Alito was appointed as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, where he served until joining the Supreme Court. He has called himself a "practical originalist" and is a member of the Supreme Court's conservative bloc.

Alito has written majority opinions in the landmark cases McDonald v. Chicago (2010) on firearm rights, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) on insurance coverage, Janus v. AFSCME (2018) on public-sector union security agreements, and Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022) on abortion.

Alito was born in Trenton, New Jersey. He was the son of Samuel A. Alito Sr., a Calabrian immigrant from Roccella Ionica, Calabria, and Rose Fradusco, an Italian-American whose parents came from Palazzo San Gervasio in Basilicata. Alito's father earned a master's degree at Rutgers University and was a high school teacher and later the first director of the New Jersey Office of Legislative Services, a state government position he held from 1952 to 1984. Alito's mother was a schoolteacher.

Alito grew up in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, a suburb of Trenton. He attended Steinert High School, where he graduated in 1968 as the class valedictorian, subsequently matriculating at Princeton University. In 1972, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His senior thesis, supervised by political scientist Walter F. Murphy, was entitled "An Introduction to the Italian Constitutional Court".

At Princeton, Alito chaired a student conference in 1971 called "The Boundaries of Privacy in American Society", which supported curbs on domestic intelligence gathering and anticipated the need for a statute and a court to oversee national security surveillance. The conference report itself also called for the decriminalization of sodomy, and urged an end to discrimination against gay people in hiring. Alito also led the American Whig-Cliosophic Society's Debate Panel during his time at Princeton. He avoided Princeton's eating clubs, joining Stevenson Hall instead.

In December 1969, while a sophomore at Princeton, Alito received a low lottery number of 32 in the Selective Service drawing. He became a member of the school's Army ROTC program. Alito was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army Reserve in 1972. He began his military duty after graduating from law school in 1975 and served on active duty from September to December while attending the Signal Officer Basic Course at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Alito was promoted to first lieutenant and captain, and completed his service obligation as a member of the inactive reserve before being honorably discharged in 1980.

At Princeton, Alito was "almost alone" in his familiarity with the writings of John Marshall Harlan II and was much influenced by the course on constitutional interpretation taught by Walter F. Murphy, also his faculty adviser. During his senior year at Princeton, Alito moved out of New Jersey for the first time to study in Italy, where he wrote his thesis on the Italian legal system. Graduating in 1972, Alito left a sign of his aspirations in his yearbook, which said that he hoped to "eventually warm a seat on the Supreme Court".