A Search for Order, an Answer in the Law

Classmate Richard R. Clifton, now a 9th Circuit appellate judge, remembers Alito had a different concern. Alito thought that a majority vote to suspend classes would be unfair to a minority who wanted to study. "He was very frustrated," Alito's wife, Martha, said he told her. "He wanted his education."

Many students joined selective-admissions dining clubs dominated by sons of the rich, but Alito chose instead the anti-elitist Stevenson Hall (named for Democrat Adlai E. Stevenson), which welcomed all comers. Friends knew Alito as a confirmed anti-snob, flashing a dry, acerbic wit at any sign of pomposity.

He immersed himself in the study of law, history and politics -- and again debate. His closest friends were all, like him, studious majors in Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School who dined at Stevenson, where they were more likely to debate John Rawls's "A Theory of Justice" than Vietnam. Still, "I knew he was greatly bothered by all the upheaval of the '60s," said Ken Burns, now a lawyer in San Francisco.

Alito had a ringside seat on an ambitious student-faculty effort to make Princeton's decision making more responsive to change, to head off student protest. The chairman of the project, professor Stanley Kelley, who knew Alito's academic work, hired him to take notes and do research while passions flared.

The university approved the group's recommendations, giving students much more influence over tenure, curriculum, dorm curfew and other policies. (A conservative alumni group that Alito listed among his affiliations in a 1985 job application, Concerned Alumni of Princeton, would later say the effort had turned Princeton over to left-wing students.) Kelley said Alito never expressed a view of the deliberations.

Samuel Lipsman, an outspoken leftist who headed Princeton's debate panel, knew Alito's leanings, but only because he asked him directly. "I knew he was conservative and he supported the president and defended the war, but he didn't carry signs even metaphorically," said Lipsman, who nominated Alito to succeed him as debate panel president. "He never antagonized."

Alito's good friend and fellow debater, Andrew P. Napolitano, a self-described "notorious campus conservative" and now a Fox News commentator, said Lipsman knew more than he did: "I do not recall hearing a conservative peep out of Sam's mouth."

But in Alito's mind, he would later write, a conservative legal philosophy was forming by his junior year when he read the works of Yale law professor Alexander M. Bickel, a pioneering critic of the Warren Court. At a time when many intellectuals embraced liberal judicial activism as a force for good, Bickel announced in a book titled "The Supreme Court and the Idea of Progress" that the Warren Court's most sacrosanct rulings -- including Brown v. Board of Education and one man, one vote -- were badly reasoned, based not on the Constitution, but on the egalitarian visions of individual justices. A moderate to liberal Democrat, Bickel wrote that no matter how noble the result, this unelected branch was threatening democracy.

Bickel's views ignited profound unease and even fury in intellectual circles, where the Warren Court was seen as having protected individual rights from being trampled by the majority. Yale activists burned Bickel in effigy in 1969.

For Alito, however, discovering Bickel proved a seminal moment. He would write later that he had objected even as a young man to the Warren Court's rulings, particularly on reapportionment, criminal procedure and public school prayer. Bickel specifically critiqued these decisions, arguing that legislatures, not courts, should execute complex social changes, even if they came more slowly. His vision meshed with Alito's desire for orderly change.

His senior year, Alito crossed paths again with his old debating rival, Jeffrey Laurenti, then a graduate student at Princeton. From similar beginnings as Italian American Catholics raised with moral certainty and respect for authority, they had taken different roads. Laurenti had turned against the Vietnam War and the president. "The scales were falling slowly from my eyes. I was groping," he said. "I don't know that Sam was."

Alito was delving into the history and workings of the Supreme Court. Charles A. Miller, then a Princeton assistant professor of constitutional law, said Alito so loved reading Supreme Court opinions that he persuaded the teacher to completely revise the syllabus of one seminar so that he could take it again.