Comparisons to Scalia, But Also to Roberts

"Even as a young lawyer, the product he turned out was superb," Barry said.

In the U.S. attorney's office, Alito also found his future wife, Martha-Ann Bomgardner, a law librarian who seemed his polar opposite. Where he was studious and reserved, she was a live wire; they married soon after he left the office to move to Washington in 1981.

A Civil Servant First

At the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, the Justice Department was evolving into a sort of Republican think tank, filled with bright young conservatives who wanted to reshape the legal landscape on such issues as school busing, affirmative action and abortion. Roberts was part of that "Band of Brothers" -- although some fellow revolutionaries say he was always more committed to the law than any policies.

Alito was not even part of that crowd, they say. He entered government as a career civil servant, not a political appointee -- first in the solicitor general's office, where he argued for the United States in 12 cases before the Supreme Court, and then at the Office for Legal Counsel, giving advice to the administration.

Alito's cases did not focus on hot-button social issues; they ranged from the rules governing the seizure of racketeering assets to the right of the Air Force to withhold the release of witness statements in accident investigations. He once argued that the Clean Water Act should not bar the Environmental Protection Agency from giving variances to polluters; his colleagues all say he was just doing his job, not making policy.

"Sam wasn't someone who talked politics," said Lawrence G. Wallace, who worked with Alito at the solicitor general's office "He was a highly professional person who didn't make a lot of waves; his whole personality was sort of buttoned down."

Alito got noticed as someone who was often the smartest guy in the room but didn't seem to have a need to flaunt it. He took an analytical approach to every case, focusing on the wording of the statutes in question. He shied away from novel legal arguments. He was so deliberate that colleagues developed a catchphrase to describe his exhaustive pondering; they called it "noodling," as in, "Oh, Sam's in there noodling again."

"He's John Roberts, but with a background in criminal law," said Michael Carvin, a colleague at the Justice Department. Former solicitor general Charles Fried, now a Harvard law professor, said the "Scalito" moniker is totally unfair, and probably based on ethnic stereotypes.

Douglas W. Kmiec, a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine who worked with Alito at Justice, points out that unlike Scalia, Alito is often interested in trying to determine the legislative intent of a statute by studying its history.

"Nino is a radical conservative, willing to turn the world upside down to achieve a conservative agenda," Fried said. "Sam is a conservative conservative. He would never do something that when it came up you'd say, 'Whoa, where did you get that?' "

Judicial Restraint

In 1985, Office of Legal Counsel head Charles Cooper asked Alito to be his deputy; he said it was clear that Alito, although less vocal than the political appointees, shared their philosophy of judicial restraint.

For example, Alito helped write a opinion that employers could legally fire AIDS victims because of a "fear of contagion, whether reasonable or not," because discrimination based on insufficient medical knowledge was not prohibited by federal laws protecting the disabled. Alito later explained that "we certainly did not want to encourage irrational discrimination, but we had to interpret the law as it stands."

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed Alito to be the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, an unusual political plum for a career civil servant. Alito got off to a rocky start when a jury acquitted 20 mob defendants his office had prosecuted -- a case he inherited from his predecessor -- but when National Law Journal described the defeat as an embarrassment for his office, Alito fired back an uncharacteristically caustic response that was twice as long as the original article, calling it "an utterly distorted picture of my office."

In general, though, Alito was known as a low-volume, by-the-book boss, driven by the law rather than any ideology. "He was his own person," said Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who was Alito's top deputy and then a colleague on the bench. "His legal behavior was never a function of any personal politics."

Lawrence Lustberg, a liberal civil rights lawyer who was once a public defender in New Jersey, recalls that Alito was never a crusader; he was willing to listen to arguments about why cases should be dismissed or plea-bargained. In 1990, when Alito was nominated for the bench, then-Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) noted that "without a lot of fanfare, without calling daily news conferences, he has inspired his office with a low-key sense of professionalism."

At his last nomination hearing, Alito faced just a handful of questions. Kennedy asked if after a career representing the government, he could treat claims against the government fairly. "I am confident that I can do that," Alito replied.

Kennedy then asked what quality was most important for an appellate judge. Open-mindedness, Alito replied. "What about that fellow on your left?" Kennedy asked. "Does he have any comment?" Philip Alito did not.

"We are glad to have you here, and we will look forward to supporting you and voting for you," Kennedy said. "We are glad your family is here, too."

Staff writers Laura Blumenfeld, Marc Fisher, Barton Gellman, Amy Goldstein and R. Jeffrey Smith and research editor Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.