Samuel Alito was no 1960s campus radical. His fealty has always been to the ordinary folk back home.
“I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly,” he said during his Senate confirmation hearing in 2006. “And I couldn’t help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community.”
Recovering from the insanity of the 1960s is a major theme of Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution by Mollie Hemingway.
Hemingway’s book has already made news by revealing that liberal justices threw tantrums and tried to “slow-walk” the final release of Dobbs v Jackson, the 2022 decision that overturned Roe v Wade. Justice Sotomayor claimed the Court’s legitimacy was at stake and, according to Hemingway, Justice Kagan yelled loudly enough to rattle the walls on First Street.
Alito is beautifully written and cogently explains legal terms and Justice Alito’s personality. Hemingway describes Alito’s jurisprudence as part originalism: in short, sticking to the plain meaning of what the Founding Fathers and Congress wrote into law, but also something more. Alito rejects a “hyper-literalist” approach to originalism while preferring a method that more closely comports with outcomes ordinary citizens might want.
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