Samuel Alito

Samuel Anthony Alito Jr. (born April 1, 1950) is an American jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

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.

Both are deceased.

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 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.

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 for an end to discrimination against gays in hiring by employers.

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 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".

Alito was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army Reserve in 1972.

Graduating in 1972, Alito left a sign of his lofty aspirations in his yearbook, which said that he hoped to "eventually warm a seat on the Supreme Court".

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 then attended Yale Law School, where he served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal and earned a Juris Doctor in 1975.

After graduating from law school, Alito clerked for Third Circuit appeals judge Leonard I. Garth in Newark, New Jersey, in 1976 and 1977.

He interviewed with Supreme Court Justice Byron White for a clerkship but was not hired.

Between 1977 and 1981, Alito was Assistant United States Attorney, District of New Jersey.

There, he served under the then-chief of the appeals division Assistant U.S. Attorney, Maryanne Trump Barry (Barry later became a federal judge).

While an Assistant U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, he prosecuted many cases involving drug trafficking and organized crime.

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.

From 1981 to 1985, Alito was Assistant to U.S. Solicitor General Rex E. Lee.

In that capacity he argued 12 cases before the Supreme Court for the federal government.

In Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (1986), the Supreme Court ruled against Charles Fried after he rejected a memo by Alito urging the Solicitor General to avoid directly attacking the constitutional right to an abortion.

Alito lost only two of the cases he argued before the Supreme Court.

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 has been described as one of the Court's "most conservative justices".

Alito wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), in which the Supreme Court overturned its 1973 abortion rights decision Roe v. Wade.

He has also written majority opinions in the landmark cases McDonald v. Chicago, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Murphy v. NCAA, and Janus v. AFSCME.

Alito was born in Trenton, New Jersey.

He was the son of Samuel A. Alito Sr., an Italian immigrant from Roccella Ionica, Calabria, and Rose Fradusco, an Italian-American whose parents came from Palazzo San Gervasio in Basilicata.

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 was educated at Princeton University and Yale Law School.

After graduating from 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.