In the weeks since the U.S. Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito was announced by President Bush, conservatives have praised the choice. Alito, who spent the last 15 years on the 3rd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, received a different reception from that experienced by prior nominee and White House counsel Harriet Miers.

Miers, a ground-breaking corporate lawyer from Texas who was heading up the search for Supreme Court nominees after the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, withdrew her name from consideration late last month.

Her nomination roused an outcry from both liberals and conservatives who pointed to her lack of judicial experience and a record that is cloudy or nonexistent on many of the social issues at the heart of any confirmation hearing.

In contrast, Alito has compiled a sizeable judicial record that will take time for politicians and pundits on both sides of the political spectrum to review. Some liberals and moderates already have called his stance on issues such as abortion and privacy law "troubling."

However, less than a month after the announcement of Alito as O'Connor's replacement (Chief Justice John Roberts was confirmed to replace the more conservative Rehnquist earlier this year), little information has surfaced about Alito's stance on Title IX issues. Title IX is the landmark anti-gender discrimination law that, among other things, paved the way for the rapid expansion of women's participation in athletics.

From what experts and advocates have uncovered to date, Alito -- nominated to the 3rd Circuit by President Bush's father, George H.W. Bush -- has issued no decisions on Title IX cases, though several Title VII discrimination cases came before him as an appellate judge.

Narrow reading of statutes

In those cases, he seemed to place the burden of proof on the plaintiff, said Stefanie Lindquist, associate professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University.

"He switches the burden to the plaintiff to demonstrate that the defendant had a specific intent to discriminate," she said, citing a case that appeared before Alito in
which an employee of a major hotel chain alleged racial discrimination. "That's a tough standard to meet ...
I think extrapolating from these cases, (you can infer that Alito) would not be favorable toward Title IX."

Lindquist said Alito has been known to read Congressional statutes "as narrowly as possible."

"He's pretty consistently restrained in terms of his methods of statutory interpretation and Constitutional interpretation," she said. "The Supreme Court in the past has read Title IX relatively expansively to further the statutory purpose, I'm not sure he'd do that. I think he'd probably stick to the language of the statute as carefully and narrowly as possible. I think replacing O'Connor with him probably does have some meaningful consequences for Title IX."

In several recent Title IX cases that came before the Supreme Court, Justice O'Connor was regarded as the "swing justice," even writing the majority opinion in a March 2005 decision that allowed whistleblowers to sure for retaliation under Title IX.

Lindquist said that while Alito is more conservative than O'Connor and even Roberts, who was appointed from the Court of Appeals' D.C. Circuit, she would place him to the left of justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia.

"Alito is not an ideologue as far as I can see," she said. "Scalia and Thomas really have an ax to grind. There's no indication that Alito has an ax to grind. He definitely takes a deferential stance to other branches of government, to local governmental bodies, to police, et cetera. He really is very deferential as a judge."

Lindquist said Alito has been specifically deferential to previous Supreme Court decisions, though there is no way to know if that would continue.

"Extrapolating from that to being on the Court (himself) and reviewing the Court's own precedent is a different matter," she said. "But certainly as a judge in the appeals court, he was sensitive to that. Whether he'd allow previous Title IX rulings to remain in place remains to be seen."

Abundant documentation

Alito's nomination may present the Senate with a problem the reverse of what it faced with Miers' nomination: Where Miers' record was spotty to nonexistent, information about Alito and his judicial philosophy is sizeable. Documents in his background are so vast in fact that advocacy groups researching his history have located hundreds of opinions and other documents to evaluate.

Jocelyn Samuels, vice president for education and employment at the National Women's Law Center, said her group was still researching Alito's background. What has been uncovered so far has raised concerns in the areas of civil rights, women's rights and the right to privacy, Samuels said, though none of the group's research found anything pointing to a stance on Title IX.

"But to the extent that these cases suggest an unwillingness to recognize the importance and legal foundations for women's and civil rights, they're troubling and could be extended to have an impact in the Title IX context," she said. "There is nothing in his record to date that we've found that directly addresses Title IX, much less anything that goes to athletics or the kinds of issues the NCAA would most typically be involved in."

Mike Moyer, executive director of the
National Wrestling Coaches Association (NWCA), has reserved judgment on previous nominees, indicating that a person's record as a lawyer or government employee might not represent his or her personal feelings on an issue. He said the NWCA reserves judgment on all political appointees. He said speculating on how a justice might rule is imprudent and even with a full record of past judicial decisions or Title IX cases argued, outsiders can't draw any inferences about a person's personal feelings or future rulings.

"If he were asked to comment on Title IX, we hope that he would rule as it was written and not how it's been interpreted," Moyer said.

Some Senate Democrats have expressed reservations about Alito's nomination and have not ruled out a filibuster as a tactic for derailing the Senate confirmation vote. Alito will appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 9, 2006. A full confirmation vote in the Senate is expected later that month.