[2] Alito has written majority opinions in the landmark cases McDonald v. Chicago (2010) on firearm rights, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) on insurance coverage, Janus v. AFSCME (2018) on public-sector union security agreements, and Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022) on abortion.

He was the son of Samuel A. Alito Sr., a Calabrian immigrant from Roccella Ionica, Calabria, and Rose Fradusco, an Italian-American whose parents came from Palazzo San Gervasio in Basilicata.

[3][4][5] Alito's father earned a master's degree at Rutgers University and was a high school teacher and later the first director of the New Jersey Office of Legislative Services, a state government position he held from 1952 to 1984.

[10] At Princeton, Alito chaired a student conference in 1971 called "The Boundaries of Privacy in American Society", which supported curbs on domestic intelligence gathering and anticipated the need for a statute and a court to oversee national security surveillance.

[14] At Princeton, Alito was "almost alone" in his familiarity with the writings of John Marshall Harlan II[16] and was much influenced by the course on constitutional interpretation taught by Walter F. Murphy, also his faculty adviser.

[23] In Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (1986), the Supreme Court ruled against Charles Fried after he rejected a memo by Alito urging the Solicitor General to avoid directly attacking the constitutional right to an abortion.

[26] In his 1985 application for Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Alito espoused conservative views, naming William F. Buckley, Jr., the National Review, Alexander Bickel, and Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign as major influences.

[30] After an FBI agent was shot in the line of duty in 1988, Alito personally handled the trial, assigning himself the then-novice Stuart Rabner as an assistant, and securing the shooter's conviction.

[45] Alito said that he had listed an affiliation with the group on his application to Ronald Reagan's Justice Department in order to establish his conservative credentials: "You have to look at the question that I was responding to and the form that I was filling out...

[47] In releasing its report[48] on Alito, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said, "At a time when our president has claimed unprecedented authority to spy on Americans and jail terrorism suspects indefinitely, America needs a Supreme Court justice who will uphold our precious civil liberties.

[clarification needed] Alito delivered his first written Supreme Court opinion on May 1, 2006, in Holmes v. South Carolina, a case involving the right of criminal defendants to present evidence that a third party committed the crime.

On February 1, 2006, in Alito's first decision on the Supreme Court, he voted with the majority (6–3) to refuse Missouri's request to vacate the stay of execution issued by the Eighth Circuit for death-row inmate Michael Taylor.

[72][73] In October 2020, Alito agreed with the other justices on the denial of an appeal filed by Kim Davis, a county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

[68] Alito drew controversy in June 2024 when a filmmaker who had been posing as a conservative posted a secret recording in which he could be heard agreeing with her assertion that Christians should win "the moral argument" against the Left and return the country to "a place of godliness".

Kennedy wrote for the five-justice majority that Congress was within its power to generally ban the procedure, although the Court left open the door for as-applied challenges.

Thomas filed a concurring opinion, joined by Scalia, contending that the Court's prior decisions in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey should be reversed, and also noting that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act may exceed the powers of Congress under the Commerce Clause.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter, Stephen Breyer, and John Paul Stevens dissented, contending that the ruling ignored Supreme Court abortion precedent.

On May 2, 2022, Politico published a leak of a first draft of a majority opinion by Alito that circulated among the justices in February 2022 for the upcoming decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.

The opinion would overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and would likely either severely restrict access to abortion or make it completely illegal in states with trigger laws.

Alito wrote that "Roe was egregiously wrong from the start", that its reasoning was "exceptionally weak" and that, "far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue", it had "enflamed debate and deepened division".

[82] In July 2022, Alito gave his first public comments on the ruling in a keynote address for Notre Dame Law School's Religious Liberty Initiative in Rome.

He mocked several foreign leaders for criticizing the decision, particularly U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, referencing his pending resignation, and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, who had compared the ruling to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

He wrote that he had been informed of the outcome of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby weeks before the June 2014 decision, authored by Alito and favorable to anti-abortion conservatives, was officially announced.

[87] The New York Times claims contemporaneous emails written by Schenck "strongly suggested he knew the outcome and the author of the Hobby Lobby decision before it was made public.

[87] On April 21, 2023, Alito dissented when the Supreme Court reversed a ruling by Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk that would have banned mifepristone (an emergency contraception medication) nationwide.

[88][89][90] Alito has also dissented from the opinions of the Court's conservative justices on free speech cases, one of which, Snyder v. Phelps, had to do with Westboro Baptist Church members' right to protest a military funeral.

[104] Alito further contended that because of an exemption in the Court's reporting rules for "personal hospitality", he was not required to disclose private air transport for social trips.

[108][109] The ProPublica report on unreported gifts to both Alito and Thomas led several members of Congress to call for ethics reform for the Supreme Court.

[113] The upside-down flag, traditionally a signal of distress,[114] was displayed by supporters of former president Donald Trump during the January 6 Capitol attack and by members of the Stop the Steal movement, an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Senate Committee on the Judiciary chairman Dick Durbin requested Alito's recusal from cases involving the January 6 Capitol attack or the 2020 presidential election.