Is Sam Alito a reasonable choice as Supreme Court Justice?

We are all reading tea leaves and trying to predict the future with these
Supreme Court appointments, but anyone nominated by Bush has at least two and a half strikes against them. However, the LA Times has published an interesting article that provides this description:

Some of Alito's former Yale Law School classmates who describe themselves as Democrats say they expect they will not always agree with his rulings if he joins the Supreme Court. But they say he is the best they could have hoped for from among Bush's potential nominees.

"Sam is very smart, and he is unquestionably conservative," said Washington lawyer Mark I. Levy, who served in the Justice Department during the Carter and Clinton administrations. "But he is open-minded and fair. And he thinks about cases as a lawyer and a judge. He is really very different from [Justice Antonin] Scalia. If he is going to be like anyone on the court now, it will be John Roberts," the new chief justice.

Joel Friedman teaches labor and employment law at Tulane University Law School, but is temporarily at the University of Pittsburgh because of Tulane's shutdown following Hurricane Katrina.

"Ideology aside, I think he is a terrific guy, a terrific choice," said Friedman, a Yale classmate of Alito's. "He is not Harriet Miers; he has unimpeachable credentials. He may disagree with me on many legal issues — I am a Democrat; I didn't vote for Bush. I would not prefer any of the people Bush has appointed up until now.

"The question is, is this guy [Alito] going to be motivated by the end and find a means to get to the end, or is he going to reach an end through thoughtful analysis of all relevant factors? In my judgment, Sam will be the latter."

The Law is inherently conservative, looking to the past for rules on how to behave. This is not the same as many modernRepublicann "Conservatives" who seem to want to make radical changes in how society operates and functions, so as to achieve in the future some form of conservative Utopia.

As long as Alito is bright,analyzes the facts of situations and applies existing law as practiced to those situations without trying to predetermine a conservative outcome and bend existing rule of law to achieve it, we will be lucky to find such a man in the pool of people Bush will consider that he can choose from.

Of course, there is the question of whether we really want five practicing Catholics on a nine-member court when many of the most contentious issues are likely to involve abortion rights. But this is another issue.