Early Life and Education
Alito was born in Trenton, New Jersey, to Italian American parents: Italian immigrant Samuel A. Alito, Sr., and the former Rose Fradusco. Alito's father, now deceased, was a high school teacher and then became the first Director of the New Jersey Office of Legislative Services, a position he held from 1952 to 1984. Alito's mother is a retired schoolteacher.
Alito grew up in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, a suburb of Trenton. He attended Steinert High School in Hamilton Township and graduated from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs with a Bachelor of Arts in 1972 before attending Yale Law School, where he served as editor on the Yale Law Journal and earned a Juris Doctor in 1975.
At Princeton, Alito led a student conference in 1971 called "The Boundaries of Privacy in American Society" which, among other things, supported curbs on domestic intelligence gathering, called for the decriminalization of sodomy, and urged for an end to discrimination against gays in hiring by employers. He also led the American Whig-Cliosophic Society's Debate Panel during his time at Princeton.
While a sophomore at Princeton, Alito received the low lottery number 32, in a Selective Service drawing on December 1, 1969. In 1970, he became a member of the school's Army ROTC program, attending a six-week basic training camp that year at Fort Knox, Kentucky, in lieu of having been in ROTC during his first two years in college. Alito was a member of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, which was formed in October 1972 at least in part to oppose Princeton's decisions regarding affirmative action. Apart from Alito's written 1985 statement of membership of CAP on a job application, which Alito says was truthful, there is no other documentation of Alito's involvement with or contributions in the group. Alito has cited the banning and subsequent treatment of ROTC by the university as his reason for belonging to CAP.
During his senior year at Princeton, Alito moved out of New Jersey for the first time to study in Italy, where he wrote his thesis on the Italian legal system. Graduating in 1972, Alito left a sign of his lofty aspirations in his yearbook, which said that he hoped to "eventually warm a seat on the Supreme Court."
He was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Signal Corps after his graduation from Princeton and assigned to the United States Army Reserve. Following his graduation from Yale Law School, he served on active duty from September to December 1975. The remainder of his time in the Army was served in the inactive Reserves. He was a Captain when he received an honorable discharge in 1980.
Read more about this topic: Samuel Alito
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man’s future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual’s total development lags behind?”
—Maria Montessori (1870–1952)