Three decades later, Alito’s senior thesis draws interest

With manuscript missing from university archives, a retired professor comes to the rescue

By: David Campbell
   Princeton University Emeritus Professor of Politics Walter F. Murphy has been having a tough time getting much reading done these days.
   Most recently, he had been trying to re-read the senior thesis written by U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel Alito, who was his student at Princeton more than 30 years ago.
   Professor Murphy, emeritus McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton, was the man who brought a copy of the paper to light.
   Judge Alito’s thesis was one of hundreds that went missing during the 1970s, before all senior theses were kept in the archives at Princeton’s Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library. All theses are bound volumes, and, like any book, the judge’s may have been checked out and never returned or simply misplaced.
   But Professor Murphy, impressed with his student’s brilliance, kept his original copy submitted to him for grading. He said it was one of about only six senior theses that he kept during his years at Princeton.
   The emeritus professor said in a telephone interview this week from his home in Albuquerque, N.M., that the deluge of phone calls and e-mails began shortly after the White House contacted him early last week. Someone on President George W. Bush’s staff wanted to know if the professor would be willing to talk to reporters about Judge Alito.
   That same day, President Bush named Judge Alito, a 55-year-old judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia and a 1972 graduate of Princeton, as his pick to succeed Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who is retiring from the Supreme Court.
   Judge Alito is a favorite of conservatives who objected to the president’s earlier nominee, White House legal counsel Harriet Miers, who withdrew her nomination amid criticism from the right.
   But Professor Murphy, who was Judge Alito’s senior-thesis adviser at Princeton, concedes that his former student may surprise the Bush camp — "I pray," he said.
   Since that fateful call from the White House, he started to get up to 20 phone calls and multiple e-mails each day, all of them from reporters seeking quotes and information on the president’s nominee. He said that every time he tried to re-read the thesis, the phone would ring again.
   He has since gotten through the paper. At the request of Dan Linke, archivist and curator at the Mudd library who himself was being inundated with queries from reporters, he loaned his copy to the library. Mudd digitally scanned the paper and has made a portion of it available on its Web site, then mailed it back to Professor Murphy.
   The title of the 134-page senior thesis is "An Introduction to the Italian Constitutional Court."
   The paper examines such issues as the origins and functioning of the court, which began in 1956; the backgrounds and characteristics of the justices and the political struggles associated with electing them; and the court’s decisions bearing on questions of church and state.
   "I chose to investigate the court’s work in this area because it is important, because it has probably been the most controversial, and because it is the area in which the clash of interest groups can be observed most clearly," Judge Alito wrote in the preface.
   Does the thesis offer any tantalizing hints about how he might lean as a Supreme Court justice — for example, whether he would seek to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark ruling that established abortion rights?
   According to Professor Murphy, not really.
   "What it reflects is a very intelligent, probing mind," he said. "That’s bad news for George Bush. Sam is just not an ideologue."
   Professor Murphy went on to say that very little was written in English on the subject of Italy’s Constitutional Court, and that there was not much in English that was good.
   He said he put his student in touch with friends at the University of Bologna and that a grant from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs helped fund his trip abroad to conduct research for his thesis.
   Mr. Linke said he was having breakfast and listening to NPR when news of Judge Alito’s nomination broke — and said he knew that his anticipated workday in the archives had just gotten busier.
   The morning’s first phone conversation was with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), also a Princeton graduate, who wanted a briefing on whatever the library had on the judge. After that, Mr. Linke said, "The phone kept ringing all morning."
   He said that when media requests for Judge Alito’s senior thesis started to pour in and the callers learned the paper had gone missing, of course some questioned whether it was some kind of cover-up, from the left as well as the right.
   When Professor Murphy’s copy finally arrived, the library staff, anticipating a blitz of media requests, rushed it to the digital lab and scanned it in about half a day — record time, Mr. Linke said — then mailed it back to the professor.
   "For obvious reasons, he had wanted it back," the archivist said.