Major Cases
Some of the notable court opinions Samuel A. Alito Jr. has written on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.
| Case | Year | Description | Excerpt of Alito’s opinion |
|---|---|---|---|
| ACLU v. Schundler | 1999 | Wrote for the court that a holiday display placed in front of City Hall did not violate the establishment clause because it combined secular and religious symbols of the season. | The Supreme Court’s decisions regarding holiday displays have been marked by fine line-drawing, and therefore it is not easy to determine whether particular displays satisfy the Court’s standards. Under these circumstances, the mere fact that city officials miscalculate and approve a display that is found by the federal courts to cross over the line is hardly proof of the officials’ bad faith. |
| Fatin v. INS | 1993 | Wrote in a majority opinion that a woman could establish eligibility for asylum based on gender persecution but that an Iranian woman had not met the standard in this case. | To the extent that the petitioner in this case suggests that she would be persecuted or has a well-founded fear that she would be persecuted in Iran simply because she is a woman, she has satisfied the first of the three elements we have noted. . . . She has not shown . . . that she has a well-founded fear of suffering “persecution” based solely on her gender. |
| Pitt News v. Pappert | 2004 | Wrote the majority opinion against a law that banned alcoholic beverage ads in media affiliated with educational institutions. | The suggestion that the elimination of alcoholic beverage ads from The Pitt News and other publications connected with the university will slacken the demand for alcohol by Pitt students is counterintuitive and unsupported by any evidence that the commonwealth has called to our attention. |
| Planned Parenthood v. Casey | 1991 | Dissented in the case, which struck down a Pennsylvania law that included a provision requiring women seeking abortions to notify their spouses. | The Pennsylvania legislature could have rationally believed that some married women are initially inclined to obtain an abortion without their husbands’ knowledge because of perceived problems — such as economic constraints, future plans, or the husbands’ previously expressed opposition — that may be obviated by discussion prior to the abortion. |
| Planned Parenthood v. Farmer | 2000 | Wrote a concurring opinion stating that a New Jersey law banning “partial-birth” abortions was unconstitutional because of a recent Supreme Court case. | I do not join Judge Barry’s opinion, which was never necessary and is now obsolete. That opinion fails to discuss the one authority that dictates the result in this appeal, namely, the Supreme Court’s decision in Stenberg v. Carhart. . . . Our responsibility as a lower court is to follow and apply controlling Supreme Court precedent. |
| Sheridan v. DuPont | 1996 | Dissented in the sex discrimination case, arguing that the court made it too easy for discrimination cases to reach a jury trial. | A defense motion for summary judgment or judgment as a matter of law should be granted when the evidence in the record could not persuade a rational trier of fact that intentional discrimination on the ground alleged by the plaintiff was a determinative cause of the challenged employment action. |
| United States v. Rybar | 1996 | Dissented in the case, arguing that a law banning citizens from owning assault weapons violated the Constitution’s commerce clause in light of a recent Supreme Court ruling. | I would view this case differently if Congress as a whole or even one of the responsible congressional committees had made a finding that intrastate machine gun possession, by facilitating the commission of certain crimes, has a substantial effect on interstate commerce. |
| Williams v. Price | 2003 | Wrote the majority opinion granting federal court review to an African American who could not get state courts to hear his claim of racial bias on the part of a juror in his trial. | The commonwealth’s brief argues that Hayes’s evidence did not show that the juror in question lied during voir dire. . . . We would be presented by a different question in this appeal if the state courts had made a factual finding that Hayes’s testimony was not credible or that the juror in question . . . had answered the pertinent voir dire questions truthfully. |
SOURCE: Almanac of Federal Judiciary, court records, news reports | GRAPHIC: By Seth Hamblin, The Washington Post - November 01, 2005
