Jumping on the Alito bandwagon

If you can believe the media and the blogosphere, President Bush on Monday will nominate Sam Alito for the Supreme Court.  So suggests this American Spectator post and Erick and others at confirmthem.  But because we have had surprises with the last two nominations, who knows what Monday will bring.

Notably, Larry Ribstein at Ideoblog and Dave Hoffman at Concurring Opinions are already giving Alito's business law opinions the once-over.  In contrast to the Miers and even the Roberts dynamic, the nomination of Judge Alito (or other long-time judges like Luttig or Brown or Jones) will provide a huge corpus of opinions to examine.  (Larry's post indicates his Westlaw search brought up 243 Alito majority opinions, by a Lexis search returned 705 cases when I ran "opinionby (alito)" in the Third Circuit database.) 

What particularly excites me about Alito is that, as first discussed here, his nomination should put a spotlight on criminal law issues because his pre-judicial career was as a criminal lawyer — with six years in the US Attorney's Office in New Jersey and six years in the Justice Department.  Notably, tonight Mike in this potent post at Crime & Federalism effectively spotlights "Why the Supreme Court Needs a Criminal Lawyer"; I have been harping on this topic (see here and here and here) for quite some time.

Further proof of Alito's criminal justice roots comes from his few academic writings.  An on-line search reveals three pieces: Change in Continuity at the Office of Legal Counsel, 15 Cardozo L. Rev. 507 (1993), Reviewing the Sentencing Commission's 1991 Annual Report,  5 Fed. Sent'g Rep. 166 (1992), and Documents and the Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, 48 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 27 (1986).  Obviously, two of these pieces are focused directly on criminal law topics and one — be still my heart — is about sentencing and appears in my beloved Federal Sentencing Reporter.

I wonder what Judge Alito thinks about Blakely and Booker (and Harris and Almendarez-Torres and Neder and Sullivan and ...).