Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr.
Today’s Justice of the Day is: SAMUEL A. ALITO, JR. Justice Alito was born on this day, April 1, in 1950.
Justice Alito was born in Trenton, New Jersey, the state from which he would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. He graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in 1972, and then attended Yale Law School (where he was Editor of the Yale Law Journal), graduating with a J.D. in 1975.
In 1976 Justice Alito began a year-long term as a Law Clerk to Judge Leonard I. Garth of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Immediately after his clerkship ended, he became an Assistant United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, a position he would leave upon becoming Assistant to the Solicitor General at the United States Department of Justice in 1981. Justice Alito would work within the Reagan Administration in that capacity for four years, after which he was Deputy Assistant Attorney General (from 1985 to 1987) and United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey (from 1987 to 1990). In 1990 he was appointed a Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit by President George H.W. Bush, where he would remain until his elevation to the SCUS.
Justice Alito was nominated by President George W. Bush on November 10, 2005, to a seat vacated by Justice Sandra Day O`Connor (following President Bush’s unsuccessful attempt to appoint Harriet Miers to the seat). He was confirmed by the United States Senate on January 31, 2006, the day he also received his commission and took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS. Justice Alito has served out his entire tenure on the Roberts Court and is the seventh most senior Member of the SCUS. He is an actively serving Justice.
Justice Alito’s arrival at the SCUS (and more specifically, his replacement of the retiring moderate Justice O’Connor) heralded the Court’s most noticeable swing to the right since liberal icon Justice Thurgood Marshall was succeed by the SCUS’s most conservative currently-serving Justice, Clarence Thomas. Since he joined, the unofficial position of ‘swing Justice’ has fallen to the relatively conservative (at least compared to the aforementioned Justice O’Connor) Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, which has had the effect of allowing the SCUS’s GOP-appointees to win numerous cases that they might otherwise have lost. Justice Alito himself has had a huge impact on various areas of the law, most noticeably in the recent controversies surrounding so-called ‘religious liberty’ cases, such as Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), wherein a 5-to-4 majority opinion, authored by Justice Alito, held that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (passed by Congress in the 1990’s) applies to corporations and empowers them to deny contraceptive coverage to female employees if offering such coverage would offend the claimed religious sensibilities of the businesses’ owners.