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As a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, Samuel Alito Jr. has compiled a record that includes more than 240 opinions. Of these, the most illuminating may well be his 41 dissents -- opinions that he has written by himself, rejecting the views of his colleagues.
When they touch on issues that split people along political lines, Alito's dissents show a remarkable pattern: They are almost uniformly conservative. In the overwhelming majority of cases, he has urged a more conservative position than that of his colleagues. In his dissents, at least, he has been a conservative's conservative -- not always in his reasoning, which tends to be modest, but in his ultimate conclusions.
...-- A woman and her 10-year-old child sued police officers for submitting them to a body search in violation of their constitutional rights. The court allowed the case to go forward. Alito dissented, arguing that the police had qualified immunity.
-- Prisoners in long-term segregation units were banned from receiving newspapers or magazines from either the prison library or the publisher. The majority struck down the ban as a violation of the First Amendment. Alito dissented, finding the ban to be within the prison's legal authority.
-- A trial court had refused to allow an employee who complained of racial discrimination to cross-examine a witness who had given the employee an unfavorable performance evaluation. The court ordered that the cross-examination must be permitted. Alito argued in favor of the trial court's rulings.
-- An employee complained that racial discrimination accounted for the fact that she had not been promoted. The court ruled that she had raised serious issues of fact, justifying a jury judgment. Alito dissented, complaining of "an unwarranted extension of the antidiscrimination laws."
-- A local zoning board imposed land-use restrictions on a Hindu temple. The court ruled that the restrictions were arbitrary and unlawful. Alito concluded that they were legitimate.
-- Two parents brought a wrongful death action against a college, arguing that the risk to their son from an athletic event was foreseeable. Alito concluded that the facts on which the parents relied were "insufficient."
-- Several of Alito's dissents involve important federal statutes. In a case involving workers' rights, the court ruled that a coal-processing site was a "mine" under federal law and therefore subject to the protection of the agency that regulated conditions at coal mines; Alito disagreed.
This decision hits home - my dad argued -- and won -- the original "Pre OSHA" case about 55 years ago. The case held that a "coal processing plant" comes under the same protections as a coal mine.
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