Extremely conservative. We’re finding this from our own review of his record, but we’re not alone. Consider:
George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley said, “There will be no one to the right of Sam Alito on the [Supreme] Court. This is a pretty hardcore fellow on abortion rights.”
Duke University Law Professor Erwin Chemerinsky called Alito “one of the most conservative federal judges in the U.S.” [Bloomberg News, 11/3/05.] (And that’s saying something, because there are some awfully conservative judges on the federal bench.)
An article in Slate by Robert Gordon of the Center for American Progress laid out areas of the law in which Alito’s record is even more conservative than that of Justice Scalia. (And that’s really saying something.)
University of Chicago Law Professor Cass Sunstein pointed out that the dissenting opinions Judge Alito has authored show “a remarkable pattern: They are almost uniformly conservative.” Professor Sunstein found that of the 41 dissents he reviewed, “Somewhere between 100 percent and 85 percent are to the right of the majority, depending how you count.”
A review by the New York Times of dozens of Alito’s opinions noted that they show a marked tendency to favor big business and “reveal a jurist deeply skeptical of claims against large corporations.” The Times concluded that, with few exceptions, he has sided with employers over employees in discrimination suits and in favor of corporations over investors in securities fraud cases.
Similarly, the Washington Post conducted its own review of Judge Alito’s decisions in civil rights cases, and concluded that he frequently takes positions, especially in his dissents, that “set a higher bar than his fellow judges for plaintiffs to prove that they were discriminated against – and sometimes even to get to trial.”
George Washington University Law Professor Jeffrey Rosen categorized Alito as one of the top three “Conservative Activists” on the federal bench, as distinguished from what he called the “Principled Conservatives.”
We could go on, but you probably get the idea.
