A Search for Order, an Answer in the Law

Alito wrote his research paper for Miller on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who once famously had summed up his philosophy of judicial restraint: "If my fellow citizens want to go to hell, I will help them. It's my job."

Miller was amazed by the college senior's ability "to embrace historical, philosophical and political material and modes of reasoning," according to the 1972 law school recommendation he wrote. "The logic and precision that Mr. Alito uses in both oral and written presentation is almost palpable. None of it is aggressive, indeed sometimes it is self-effacing," Miller wrote, using adjectives Alito's admirers use today.

"It's easy to say I'm prescient," said Miller, now retired, "but I think what's more true is this guy is very consistent."

The Calling of the Law

Yale Law School in 1972 was a temple of legal liberalism, and Alito soon began to feel that some professors were giving him an incomplete view of the law. He would later tell his friend Kmiec that he turned to reading extensively on his own.

"There was this note of regret in his voice that very few of them [professors] seemed to be saying things that he could readily agree with," said Kmiec, now a professor at Pepperdine University Law School.

Bickel soon became gravely ill, unable to teach. His devoted friend on the faculty, Robert H. Bork, was carrying the conservative torch, arguing that the only principled way to interpret the Constitution was to stick to the precise words of the Framers and what they meant at that time.

Bork taught that there was no constitutional basis for rights to privacy, abortion, or one man, one vote, and he criticized court-ordered busing to achieve school desegregation as judicial meddling. Classmates do not recall Alito's reaction to Roe v. Wade in 1973, but he would later write that the decision had no basis in the Constitution. Alito's mother has told reporters that he personally opposes abortion; Alito has not commented on his personal views.

Bork said in an interview that he remembers only one student -- John R. Bolton, now the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations -- who then expressed conservative views openly. "The rest of them kept their heads down," Bork said.

Alito's Yale roommate and Princeton classmate Mark Dwyer said his friend had hoped to have Bork for constitutional law, but ended up with Charles Reich, author of an unofficial bible of the protest movement, "The Greening of America."

Alito applied to be a Supreme Court clerk after law school. But, said his wife, Martha, "it was not to be at that time in his life." Instead, he went home to New Jersey to clerk for Appeals Court Judge Leonard I. Garth in Newark, a 3rd Circuit judicial craftsman in the mold of Alito's hero, Justice Harlan.

In contrast to his intellectual estrangement from Yale, Alito found in Garth a sort of father in the law. Former clerks describe him as a judge who asks himself before deciding any case whether an elected branch of government could resolve it instead.

"Judge Garth and Sam had the same philosophy, and they spoke the same language," said Kenneth Prochnow, Alito's co-clerk in 1976 and 1977.

There was another link. Alito's father had testified before Garth as a demographic expert in a 1972 New Jersey reapportionment case. "It was an extraordinary circumstance because rarely do you remember witnesses," Garth said. "But I was terribly impressed with him. I told Sam about it, and I think he was justifiably proud."

Garth, who once rated Alito 16 1/2 out of 10 as a clerk, said they used to buy a bag of peanuts and "take long walks in Newark, just the two of us, hashing out cases."

Alito was back in an orderly world after seven years in liberal cauldrons. He moved home with his parents and assumed the role of lector, or reader, at Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows.

Prochnow remembers his surprise when he realized after the 1976 presidential election that his co-clerk was a Republican. "Sam was disappointed that Jimmy Carter won," Prochnow said. "That was very strange for me, because in the environment I'd been in since 1968, I don't think I'd met any Republicans," he said, referring to his time at Columbia University and New York University Law School. "I can only imagine what it was like for Sam to have developed and held his philosophy, which must have been a minority and unpopular position, in the environments he'd been in."

Comfortable in the monastic, intellectual world of appeals -- a more solitary and research-oriented practice than the free-for-all of trial work -- Alito went to work after his clerkship in the appellate section of the U.S. attorney's office in Newark. His skills quickly made him the go-to lawyer on the most sensitive cases. One involved a top-secret exchange of two convicted Russian spies for five Russian dissidents. The intricacies kept him in the library for days, plumbing law books, as well as a Russian dictionary.

Near the end of the process, another staffer breezed by him in the library stacks, calling out offhandedly, "Hey, Sam, I heard you learned Russian over the weekend."

Martha Bomgardner, a young librarian in the U.S. attorney's office, overheard his quiet and upright-sounding answer: "I don't think that's something to talk about."

"Oh, this is a smart one," she thought.

She told friends she would marry him by the following April. But he was uncommonly shy, and despite multiple daily trips to the library, did not ask her out for 13 months. "He is judicious," she said recently with a laugh.

They had dated about a year when he got an offer from the U.S. solicitor general. The office is arguably the most respected law firm in the country, representing the U.S. government before the Supreme Court. Alito left for Washington in August 1981. "I thought that would be the end," Bomgardner said.

Four years later, Martha Bomgardner would become Martha Alito and Samuel Alito Jr. would be on a very different course.

Research editor Lucy Shackelford and researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.