A Right Cautious Nominee

O'Connor's conservatism, with its accent on states' rights, is rooted in the Western Sagebrush Rebellion against Washington. Alito's seems to have originated at least in part in the backlash against liberalism in Ivy League universities.

In his opening statement, Alito -- like Scalia, the son of an intellectually gifted Italian American -- spoke in a voice no less intelligent than, but culturally distinct from, that of Roberts, the private-school-educated son of a Midwestern steel executive.

Indeed, Alito sounded a bit like one of the millions of culturally conservative urban ethnic voters who deserted the Democratic Party in favor of Reagan after the upheaval of the 1960s.

As a public high school product on Princeton's campus in the late 1960s and early '70s, Alito said, "I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly. 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."

In terms that still evinced some of the dismay he must have felt at the time, Alito spoke of his concern over the expulsion of his ROTC unit from Princeton, which forced him to take his military classes at Trenton State. That "bothered me for a long time," he said. It was "a very bad thing for Princeton to do."

The hearings showed that Alito's involvement in the conservative Concerned Alumni of Princeton was peripheral to his career -- but that perhaps the feelings that drove him to affiliate with it, however superficially, were not.

His lingering unhappiness about the "bad" decisions made by his prestigious alma mater contrasts with the attitude O'Connor showed toward elite schools and their leaders in 2003, when she cast the deciding vote to uphold affirmative action in higher education.

"Our holding today is in keeping with our tradition of giving a degree of deference to a university's academic decisions," she wrote. Her opinion approvingly cited a pro-affirmative-action book co-written by William G. Bowen, who was provost of Princeton during Alito's student years and was the school's president at the time CAP was formed.

Asked about his reference to "traditional values" in a 1985 job application letter to Attorney General Edwin I. Meese III, Alito replied in terms that again idealized the safe streets of his boyhood.

"I think a traditional value that I probably had in mind was the ability to live in peace and safety in your neighborhood," the former federal prosecutor said. "And that was a big issue during the time of the Warren court, and it was still a big issue in 1985 when I wrote that statement because that was a time of very high crime rates. I think that's a traditional value."

Still, like Roberts, Alito did not embrace some of the most controversial legal views of Scalia and Thomas.

Scalia has said that the Supreme Court should interpret only the literal text of statutes and the Constitution, and not search historical records for evidence of their authors' intent.

But Alito said: "I'm not one of the judges who thinks that . . . you should never look to legislative history. I think it has its place."

And Alito put much greater emphasis on precedent than does Thomas, who has called for overruling decisions that clash with his view of the Constitution's literal meaning.

Stare decisis , the notion that past decisions generally should be followed to avoid legal instability, "is not an inexorable command," Alito said. But long-standing decisions such as Roe should not be overturned absent some "special justification," he said.