Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement

Politico editor Canellos (The Great Dissenter) offers a razor-sharp biography of conservative Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito. The book opens by exploring how Alito’s upbringing in Italian American New Jersey suburbia and the culture shock he experienced as a middle-class student at Princeton formed the bedrock for his later embittered judicial response to progressive social change. While he was at Princeton, explosive protests against the Vietnam War culminated in the expulsion of the ROTC, of which Alito was a member, leading him to nurture an aggrieved response to liberalism—he thought of the protesters as privileged students “free to challenge authority because they had nothing to lose.” The same upheavals that drove Alito rightward sparked the wave of conservative legal activism, spearheaded by the Federalist Society, that would propel Alito to the Supreme Court in 2005 after the failed nomination of moderate Harriet Myers, Canellos notes. Revisiting Alito’s most controversial Supreme Court decisions, Canellos painstakingly documents how Alito’s professed dedication to originalism is flexible depending on conservatives’ agenda. Though Canellos’s legal analysis is meticulous, it can drag; more juicy and haunting are observations he collects from Alito’s youthful associates—“Nobody would describe him... as humble or a nice guy anymore,” remarks one college friend. It’s a revealing deconstruction of an inscrutable justice whose tenure has “rocked the facade of American law.” (Apr.)