Progressive Nation

November 2nd, 2005

Alito’s Sodomy Report

There’s been some noise made about the report of a committee Alito chaired while an undergrad at Princeton that urged protection for the personal privacy of individuals. The report argues that “the judiciary should be entrusted with preventing abuses” of the administrative search power that the Court had upheld as constitutional in the 1967 Camara case. It goes on to argue that “it is . . . quite wrong for military intelligence to get deeply involved in domestic surveillance.” It also urges overturning sodomy laws in place at the time that discriminated against gays, and said that “discrimination against homosexuals in hiring should be forbidden.”

My thinking is that this was a policy document Alito helped write in a Woodrow Wilson School task force (the Globe story suggests that he wrote it himself, or at least the interesting parts himself, but that’s really not clear from the document). That tells you several things: (1) this was not his personal view, but instead the result of a give-and-take between all the students in the course; (2) we shouldn’t take this as indicative of what he actually thought at the time; (3) we definitely shouldn’t take this as indicative of anything Alito believes now. I’m more inclined to believe Jonathan Turley’s analysis of Alito’s views on privacy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Judiciary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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