Imagine a man who rose from modest roots in Trenton, New Jersey, the son of a public school teacher and an Italian immigrant father, who went on to attend Princeton and Yale Law School, not through privilege but through relentless discipline and a quiet certainty that he was called to defend the Constitution. That man is Samuel Alito. For nearly two decades on the Supreme Court, he has been one of the most consequential justices of his generation, authoring the opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade, standing firm on religious liberty, and championing an originalist reading of the text. But alongside that record of intellectual rigor and legal achievement, there is another, more troubling thread. Critics, ethicists, political opponents, and even some conservative scholars have watched with growing alarm as Alito has repeatedly flirted with the appearance of partisan bias, personal grievance, and an indifference to the ordinary rules of judicial conduct. The content of his story, stripped to its essential truth, is that Justice Samuel Alito has indeed a history of nudging the boundaries of judicial rectitude. But to understand the human being behind the robe, one must appreciate the tension between his self-image as a principled defender of the law and a reality in which his actions often seem to blur the very lines he claims to protect.
The pattern did not begin with the famous flags, though those have become the clearest symbol of it. Alito’s career before the Supreme Court was marked by a real talent for finding himself at the center of ideological firestorms. As a lawyer in the Justice Department under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and later as a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, he earned a reputation as a sharp, meticulous, and deeply conservative jurist. His confirmation hearing in 2006 was a studied exercise in judicial modesty. Senators pressed him on abortion, executive power, and civil rights, and he responded with carefully rehearsed assurances that judges must set aside personal preferences and follow the law. He told the Senate Judiciary Committee, with a straight face and a soft voice, that he would “honor the role of the judiciary as an independent branch” and that he understood the difference between law and politics. Yet even then, his refusal to fully answer controversial questions, his evasions about his membership in the Federalist Society, and his dismissive attitude toward critics hinted at a man who saw himself not as a neutral arbiter but as a warrior against a culture gone wrong. The confirmation process humanized him in some ways, showing a man who had worked long hours in cramped offices and who once wept when his parents came to court to see him sworn in. But it also exposed a stubbornness, a refusal to concede even the appearance of bias, that would reappear over and over in the years to come.
Perhaps the most revealing chapter in this history is his reaction to the Dobbs decision and the cultural storm that followed. When the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked in May 2022, Alito was both the author and the most wounded by the leak. He called it a “grave betrayal” and spoke emotionally about how it had changed the internal workings of the Court. No one doubts that the leak was a violation of Court confidentiality, and Alito had every right to feel violated. But instead of confronting the grievance with a careful profession of judicial detachment, he channeled a raw, almost messianic rage that spilled over into public statements and private appearances. In a speech at a conference on religious liberty, Alito told the audience that the Court had been accused of a “lawless” ruling, and he implicitly framed his critics as enemies of the Constitution. He seemed to relish the fight rather than to rise above it. At another event, he said with a smirk that he was not worried about attacks from “elites” and “snobs,” drawing applause from a conservative crowd. Such rhetoric is understandable for a politician or an activist. For a Supreme Court justice, it is jarring. It humanizes him, in the sense that he is a flesh-and-blood man who feels resentments and lashing back. But it also dehumanizes the institution he serves. A justice who responds to public criticism with personal counterattacks may be defending his honor, but he is also diminishing the detached dignity upon which the Court’s legitimacy depends.
Then came the flags, and with them, the boundary between private life and public office collapsed entirely. In 2024, reports emerged that an upside-down American flag, a symbol used by those who believed the 2020 election was stolen, had flown outside Alito’s home in Virginia. The upside-down flag is not a conventional statement of displeasure with the weather; it is a visual declaration of political emergency, a signal that the Republic is itself in peril. Alito’s explanation was that his wife, Martha-Ann, hung the flag during a dispute with a neighbor, and that he had no part in it. He later wrote a letter to Senate Democrats, saying that “I was not aware of it at the time” and that the incident “did not relate to the events of January 6.” Yet even if his account is fully believed, the aftermath shows a deeper problem. When the second flag appeared, the so-called “Appeal to Heaven” flag, flown at his beach house in New Jersey, it did so under circumstances that raised the same questions. That flag, a pine tree with the motto “An Appeal to God,” has become a symbol of the Christian nationalist movement, carried by some of the same crowds who stormed the Capitol. Alito again blamed his wife, saying she had flown it her whole life and that he respected her independent choices. But he did not apologize. He did not express regret. He did not step aside from the January 6-related cases then pending before the Court. In fact, when lawmakers requested he recuse himself, Alito refused, writing that he had “a duty to sit” and that recusal would only give opponents a weapon. This is the boundary-nudging pattern in its purest form: a series of gestures that create a powerful impression of partisan solidarity, followed by an angry insistence that no ethical norm has been violated and a scolding of those who would question him. Humanizing this behavior does not mean excusing it. It means seeing a man who genuinely believes he is the victim of a coordinated campaign to smear his name, and who has therefore convinced himself that any response is justified, including responses that further corrode the public trust in the Court.
The ethics troubles do not end with flags. Alito has repeatedly found himself in situations where a less passionate judge would have paused and considered how the outside world would perceive his choices. He has been criticized for speaking at a gathering linked to the Federalist Society, which is not itself a scandal, but he has done so while also refusing to disclose details of his dealings with its donors. He has accepted expensive gifts and trips, including a luxury fishing trip paid for by a hedge fund billionaire, without reporting the identity of the host or reimbursing the cost in a timely way. He has moved money and offices in ways that suggest an awareness of optics without a willingness to change behavior. More deeply, he has made no secret of his belief that the Court is increasingly under siege by the media and the political left, and he has used that narrative to dismiss every ethics complaint as a political attack. In his own writing, including a 2023 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, he insisted that “no one has ever accused me of misusing my judicial position for personal gain,” as if personal enrichment were the only dimension of ethical misbehavior. But the problem with judicial ethics is not only about greed. It is about the appearance of fairness, about the subtle ways in which a judge’s outside allegiance can shape his inside judgment. A judge who flies a flag connected to an election fraud movement cannot credibly tell the world that he will approach a case involving an election fraud defendant with a purely neutral mind. A justice who turns every criticism into an opportunity to portray himself as a righteous martyr cannot then complain that the public views the Supreme Court as just another partisan actor. This is the human tragedy of Alito’s tenure: he is, by all accounts, a brilliant legal mind, a loving father, a faithful parishioner, a man who genuinely believes he is protecting the Constitution from those who would destroy it. And yet, because he refuses to acknowledge the human reality that symbols matter, that appearances matter, that a judge cannot simply declare himself impartial and then behave like a participant in the culture wars, he has become one of the central figures in the collapse of the Supreme Court’s public legitimacy.
In the end, the story of Justice Alito is not a story about a corrupt man. It is a story about a man who has become too certain of his own virtue to see the harm he is causing. He entered the law at a time when originalism was considered an outsider’s creed, when conservative judges were often mocked in elite circles, and he seems to have carried that combative, underdog mentality onto the highest bench in the land. He does not wake up in the morning plotting to destroy judicial ethics. He wakes up believing that he is under attack, that his faith is under attack, that his country is under attack, and that the rules of prudence are literal weapons that his enemies will use against him. That is deeply human. Every one of us can imagine how painful it is to be accused of wrongdoing when you believe you are innocent. But the office of a Supreme Court justice requires more than personal innocence. It requires a willingness to sacrifice personal pride for the sake of institutional trust. It requires a kind of humility that says, even if I am right, even if these are just family symbols, even if my wife has a right to do whatever she wants, my duty to the rule of law and to the citizens who look to me for fair judgment demands that I act with extra care. Alito has never been able to embrace that humility. He fights, he explains, he blames others, he refuses to step back. In doing so, he has made himself a symbol of a Court that is drifting from its moorings, a Court increasingly seen as illegitimate by half the country. Perhaps one day he will look back and wonder whether the boundary he really crossed was not between political opinion and judicial review, but between the justice he believed himself to be and the justice the nation needed him to be. Until then, the history remains what it is: a record of a brilliant and stubborn man, who spent his life defending the law, yet too often forgot that the law is also defended by the quiet restraint of those who occupy its highest bench.
