In third term on high court, Alito is speaking out

WASHINGTON - By his account, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has slipped from the public mind since he was confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court. It is inside the court where he is starting to be noticed.

"Right after my hearings, people more frequently recognized me, but now I'm pretty anonymous, which is a good thing," Alito said in an interview at the court.

Noticed or not, as he enters his third year on the court, Alito is carving out an identity that couples conservatism with streaks of independence.

He has aligned himself with justices who would limit abortion rights and give the government more leeway to support religion, while refusing to go as far as Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas would like.

Alito, 57, is asserting his views more vocally during the court's current term, asking more questions during arguments, and increasingly second-guessing his colleagues.

In December, Alito wrote a dissent that criticized recent high court decisions giving trial judges greater freedom in sentencing convicted criminals. Those rulings "cannot be defended as a matter of principle" and shouldn't be extended, Alito said.

"The only one who said, 'Hey, what are we doing?' was Alito," said Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass., and former top Supreme Court lawyer for President Ronald Reagan.

Alito says he is now comfortable in his job after what he called a "rocky beginning." He took his seat halfway through the 2005-06 term after a confirmation fight.

"The first term was very strange because I started in the middle of the term and I was exhausted before I got here from the confirmation," said Alito, who had served 15 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia.

He has since settled in personally and professionally. He and his wife, Martha-Ann, sold their New Jersey home and bought one in northern Virginia. He has adorned his office with baseball caps bearing the logo of his beloved Phillies.

Alito even reached a truce of sorts with one of his adversaries from the confirmation fight, legal activist Ralph Neas, president emeritus of the Washington-based People for the American Way.

Early last year, Alito was talking with reporters at a book party when his wife interrupted with Neas in tow. She had discovered that the three attended a wedding together decades earlier and that they now worshipped at the same Roman Catholic church.

"Gee, Martha-Ann, and here I thought you were going to just bring me back a glass of wine," the justice quipped, according to Neas.

But Neas and other liberal activists say Alito has confirmed their worst fears.

Like President Bush's other appointee, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Alito voted to allow abortion restrictions; limit school-integration efforts; shield Bush's faith-based initiatives from challenges; restrict government efforts to regulate campaign spending; and cut back consumer lawsuits against companies.

"They are in the mode of Thomas and Scalia," Neas said.

Still, Alito has stopped short of voting to overturn precedents that Thomas and Scalia decry, including the landmark

Roe v. Wade

abortion-rights decision.

In that regard, Alito resembles the justice he replaced, Sandra Day O'Connor, more than he does Scalia, said Marci Hamilton, a professor at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law in New York.

"Justice Alito is just not willing to overturn precedents precipitously," said Hamilton, a former O'Connor law clerk.

Alito has also sought to limit the reach of some decisions. When the court ruled in June against a high school student who displayed a "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner, Alito wrote separately to say the decision applied only to cases of student advocacy of illegal drug use.

The decision "provides no support for any restriction of speech that can plausibly be interpreted as commenting on any political or social issue," he wrote.

Alito is showing a "propensity not to say more than he has to in given cases," said Michael Gerhardt, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who expressed concerns about Alito during his 2006 confirmation hearings.