Alito

This nonfiction account by journalist Mollie Hemingway traces the life, career, and jurisprudence of Justice Samuel Alito, arguing that he is the most consequential and underappreciated member of the current Supreme Court. Hemingway presents Alito as a humble, brilliant jurist committed to constitutional principle amid escalating campaigns to delegitimize the Court he helped transform.

Hemingway opens with the chaos surrounding Brett Kavanaugh's October 2018 Supreme Court confirmation, when protesters stormed the Court's steps. The commotion was visible from Alito's chambers, which he had just occupied after Justice Anthony Kennedy's retirement. A photo on his wall with his former mentor, Judge Leonard Garth, bears the Latin maxim fiat justitia, ruat caelum ("Let justice be done though the heavens fall"), which Hemingway treats as the defining thread of Alito's career. In the years that followed, political threats against the Court escalated: Five Democratic senators filed a brief threatening to pack the Court over a gun rights case, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer threatened Justices Neil Gorsuch and Kavanaugh by name on the Court's steps, prompting a rare public rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts.

Hemingway traces Alito's origins. Born in 1950 in Trenton, New Jersey, to the children of Italian immigrants, Samuel Alito Jr. grew up in the blue-collar suburb of Mercerville. His father, Samuel Alito Sr., directed New Jersey's nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services. His mother, Rose Fradusco Alito, became a teacher and later an elementary school principal. Both parents instilled rigorous intellectual standards and a belief in duty over passion. Young Alito excelled academically, loved baseball, and discovered a passion for debate; his high school topic on criminal investigation procedures sparked his interest in constitutional interpretation. He graduated as valedictorian in 1968 and entered Princeton, where he joined the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) during the Vietnam era, wearing his uniform across a campus convulsed by antiwar protests. The constitutional scholar Walter Murphy became his most influential professor. At Yale Law School, his hopes of studying with the constitutional theorist Alexander Bickel were cut short when Bickel fell ill and died.

After Yale, Alito clerked for Judge Garth on the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, learning to ground decisions in factual records rather than abstract principles. He worked in the US attorney's office in Newark, where he met his future wife, Martha-Ann Bomgardner, then joined the solicitor general's office in Washington, arguing his first Supreme Court case in 1982. He later served in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel under the Reagan administration and as US attorney for the District of New Jersey, overseeing organized crime and terrorism prosecutions. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush nominated him to the Third Circuit, where he was unanimously confirmed and spent 15 years building a reputation for rigorous, fact-driven opinions.

Hemingway recounts the political maneuvering behind Alito's 2005 Supreme Court nomination. When Justice Sandra Day O'Connor retired, President George W. Bush first selected John Roberts, then redirected him to replace the recently deceased Chief Justice William Rehnquist. For O'Connor's seat, Bush nominated his White House counsel, Harriet Miers, but conservative outrage forced her withdrawal, and Bush turned to Alito. His confirmation hearings were contentious, with Democrats attacking his 1985 Reagan-era job application and his membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a conservative alumni group. On the third day, Senator Lindsey Graham apologized for the character attacks, and Martha-Ann broke into tears, creating the defining image of the proceedings. Alito was confirmed 58 to 42 on January 31, 2006.

The book surveys the Roberts Court across Alito's tenure. Hemingway describes his first controversial majority opinion in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., a sex discrimination case, and the moment cameras caught him mouthing "Simply not true" during President Barack Obama's 2010 State of the Union address, when Obama mischaracterized the Court's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision. She profiles Justice Sonia Sotomayor as forceful but sometimes imprecise, Justice Elena Kagan as the most effective liberal strategist, Justice Clarence Thomas as a principled originalist who plants seeds for future decisions, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett as cautious but increasingly firm. Chief Justice Roberts draws the sharpest criticism: Hemingway argues that his pattern of siding with the liberal bloc on high-profile cases, such as his vote to uphold the Affordable Care Act in 2012, has repeatedly undermined conservative legal goals.

A substantial portion of the book documents what Hemingway calls a coordinated campaign to delegitimize the conservative majority, tracing it from the defeat of Robert Bork's 1987 Supreme Court nomination to post-2020 attacks on Alito and Thomas. The investigative outlet ProPublica published stories attacking Thomas for trips with his friend, the billionaire Harlan Crow, and targeting Alito over a 2008 fishing trip to Alaska. Hemingway argues the coverage applied a double standard, as liberal justices accepted comparable gifts without scrutiny. In 2024, The New York Times reported that an American flag had been flown upside-down at the Alitos' home, framing it as a political symbol. Alito explained that his wife placed it in response to a neighbor's obscene yard signs; a secretly recorded conversation with Martha-Ann later confirmed his account. Democratic senators demanded that Alito recuse himself from Trump-related cases; he refused, citing his wife's First Amendment rights.

The book's central narrative concerns Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death in September 2020 and Barrett's subsequent confirmation shifted the Court's ideological balance. Mississippi had passed its Gestational Age Act in 2018, limiting abortions after 15 weeks' gestation, and Attorney General Lynn Fitch and Solicitor General Scott Stewart asked the Court directly to overrule Roe, defying the advice of Washington lawyers. At oral argument in December 2021, Alito asked Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar whether an egregiously wrong decision could be overruled simply because it was wrong, using Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision upholding racial segregation, as his example. Thomas, as senior justice in the five-member majority, assigned the opinion to Alito, who completed the draft by early January 2022. The other four majority justices joined by mid-February.

On May 2, 2022, Politico published the leaked draft, an unprecedented breach. Protests erupted at justices' homes, and hundreds of pregnancy centers and churches were vandalized. An armed man traveled to Kavanaugh's home intending to kill him; the Alitos were moved to a secure location. Alito asked the liberal dissenters to expedite their work because delay created an incentive to harm a majority justice before the decision was issued, but they refused. The final opinion, released June 24, 2022, returns authority over abortion regulation to elected representatives and dismantles the legal reasoning of Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that had reaffirmed Roe's central holding.

Hemingway analyzes Alito's jurisprudence as "practical originalism," an approach rooted in the Constitution's original meaning but attentive to the specific facts of each case. She traces his religious liberty opinions from a Third Circuit ruling protecting Muslim police officers' right to wear beards through Supreme Court decisions expanding protections for religious exercise. She examines his incremental, decade-long campaign to overturn forced public union dues, culminating in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (2018), and his sharp dissent in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), where he accuses the majority of reading sexual orientation and gender identity protections into the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The book closes with a portrait of Alito as an improbable justice who reached his position through intellect and hard work rather than self-promotion. Hemingway invokes Albert Jay Nock's parable of the prophet Isaiah, charged with sustaining a faithful "Remnant" that will rebuild when institutions fail. She frames Alito as a man of steadfast convictions who has quietly delivered justice while anchoring the Court through its most turbulent era, closing with his quotation of Judge Learned Hand: "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court…can do much to help it" (281).