Bush nominates Samuel Alito.
From the Slate article I linked to on page one of this thread (Links to some cases added):
Age: 55
Graduated from: Yale Law School.
He clerked for: Judge Leonard Garth.
He used to be: deputy assistant attorney general under Reagan, U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey.
He's now: a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit (appointed 1990).
His confirmation battle:
Alito has the Scalia-esque nickname "Little Nino" and the Italian background to match it. As the author of a widely noted dissent urging his court to uphold restrictions on abortion that the Supreme Court then struck down, in a decision that reaffirmed Roe v. Wade, Alito could be especially filibuster-prone. Like Scalia, he frequently makes his mark in dissent.
Separation of Church and State
For a unanimous panel, upheld a lower-court order requiring a school district to allow a Bible-study group to set up an information table at an elementary-school back-to-school night. Reasoned that by preventing the group from displaying its literature, the district was discriminating on the basis of viewpoint. (
Child Evangelism Fellowship of N.J., Inc. v. Stafford Township School District, 2004) (
PDF)
For a unanimous panel, denied standing to a group seeking to take down a municipal holiday display that included a menorah and a crèche. Alito said that the group couldn't challenge the display as taxpayers because the items were donated rather than bought by the town. (
ACLU-NJ v. Township of Wall,2001)
Dissented from a ruling by the 3rd Circuit as a whole that an elementary school did not violate the First Amendment rights of a kindergartener by taking down (and then putting back up) a Thanksgiving poster he'd made that said the thing he was most thankful for was Jesus. The majority decided to throw out the case on a technicality; Alito protested that the child's claim should go forward. (
C.H. v. Oliva, 2000)
Criminal Law
Allowed a federal probation office in Delaware to condition the release of a man who had pleaded guilty to receiving child pornography on his willingness to submit to random polygraph tests about whether he'd had impermissible contact with children. (
United States v. Warren, 2003)
Dissented from a refusal to grant police officers immunity from a civil suit brought by a mother and her 10-year-old daughter who'd each been strip-searched because they lived in the home of a suspected drug dealer. Alito felt the police had behaved reasonably because the warrant led them to conclude that there was probable cause to search everyone in the house for drugs. (
Doe v. Groody, 2004) (
PDF)
Habeas Corpus
Granted the habeas claim of an African-American defendant who sought to introduce evidence that a juror made a racist remark after the jury reached its verdict. (
Williams v. Price, 2003)
Abortion
Dissented from a decision holding that Pennsylvania could not require women to inform their husbands before getting abortions. Alito argued that because the law only required the husbands to have notice and did not give them a veto over their wives' decisions, it did not pose an "undue burden" for women. This approach was rejected by the Supreme Court. (
Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 1991) (Can't find the district court's opinion.
Supreme Court decision here.)
Agreed that an immigration judge was within his discretion to find not credible an application for asylum based on China's forced-abortion policy. (
Xue-Jie Chen v. Ashcroft, 2004) (
PDF)
