Italian American Heritage Month: Samuel A. Alito, Jr.

Samuel A. Alito, Jr

Justice Samuel Alito was born in Trenton, New Jersey and grew up in nearby Hamilton Township. He is a US Army veteran and a graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School. He married Martha-Ann Bomgardner in 1985, and has two children - Philip and Laura. He served as a law clerk for Leonard I. Garth of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from 1976–1977. He was Assistant U.S. Attorney, District of New Jersey, 1977–1981, Assistant to the Solicitor General, U.S. Department of Justice, 1981–1985, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice, 1985–1987, and U.S. Attorney, District of New Jersey, 1987–1990. He was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in 1990. President George W. Bush nominated him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and he took his seat January 31, 2006, becoming only the second Italian American to be appointed to the nation's highest court. He is the son of Samuel A. Alito Sr., an Italian immigrant, and Rose Fradusco, an Italian-American. His grandparents came from Roccella Ionica, Calabria and Palazzo San Gervasio, Basilicata, in southern Italy. 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. Alito's mother was a schoolteacher.