REVENGE FOR THE SIXTIES

Critical biography of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, scholar and reactionary.

A longtime student of the judiciary, Canellos opens his narrative with a telling scene from the culture wars: on the one side, activists opposing any celebration of Christopher Columbus, and on the other, conservative Italian Americans who view Columbus as a hero of their ancestral home. Alito strongly inclined to the latter view, having been “buffeted by shifting values” in his youth during the 1960s and ’70s and having chosen the conservative cause every time out. At Princeton, fellow students remembered him as humble, brilliant, and hardworking, if, in one view, “a real dweeb, a person you should steer clear of.” His conservatism hardened against the dominant culture as he attended mass while his dormmates recovered from hangovers; at the height of the Vietnam War, he joined the campus ROTC in a time when opposition to the war was at a fever pitch. Confronting his antiwar peers, Canellos writes in support of his book’s title, “Alito and the protesters were on that rarest of trajectories: a collision course without an end.” That is to say, Alito never gave up fighting the culture wars of the day, and, though he brands himself as an originalist faithful to the letter of the Constitution, he is in truth a judicial activist pressing increasingly extreme right-wing interests, at one time by way of the Federalist Society. Long bent on overturning Roe v. Wade, he had his chance when elevated to the Supreme Court bench, and indeed, writes Canellos, “supporters [of abortion rights] could only wonder whether the fusion of law and politics that allowed the conservative legal movement to flourish could have happened without Roe.” And, for that matter, without Alito, Canellos argues.

Provocative reading for students of the Supremes, of whatever stripe.