The Newer Textualism: Justice Alito's Statutory Interpretation‪.‬

I. INTRODUCTION Despite his fifteen-year tenure as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Justice Samuel Alito remained something of a mystery when he was nominated to the Supreme Court in 2005. His lower court opinions were described as "reserved," much unlike the sometimes polemical screeds penned by other members of the bench. (1) Justice Alito's seemingly conservative views as an appellate judge prompted some commentators to compare him to Justice Antonin Scalia, (2) but these analysts made little headway in defining Justice Alito's legal methodology with any measure of precision. More than a year after his confirmation, legal scholars, the media, and the American public still have many questions about Justice Alito. This Note attempts to answer one of those questions: What is Justice Alito's method of statutory interpretation?