Sometimes I wonder whether there is something wrong with me. I was asked recently whether I had ever dreamed of being a U.S. Supreme Court justice. My answer was “no.” Indeed, it never really occurred to me to want to be on the Supreme Court. I always wanted to be a professor. But today I learned that, according to Wikipedia, Judge Samuel Alito put it into his college yearbook that he wanted someday to “warm a seat on the Supreme Court.” I’ve got to say that I have to admire someone who manages to achieve his college goals.

The battle for the Alito nomination is now under way. It is clear that Judge Alito will not be as easy a confirmation as was Chief Justice Roberts. This is not to say that Judge Alito doesn’t have superb credentials. He graduated from Princeton and Yale Law School. He held several important government legal positions and served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The American Bar Assn. rated him as well-qualified.

Judge Alito also seems to be a genuinely pleasant person who has made his way in the world by merit. Both of his parents were school teachers. He’s even had a coffee roast named after him by his local coffee shop (something I personally consider a major honor equal, at least, to an honorary degree).

Indeed, Sen. Charles Shumer, a leading Democrat, admitted on Sunday that Judge Alito had the proper judicial temperament, background and credentials to be on the Supreme Court. As Sen. Shumer also was quick to point out, the battle over Judge Alito will be over his judicial philosophy.

If Judge Alito has a problem being confirmed to the Supreme Court it will certainly come from the fact that he has been overly candid through the years about his beliefs and has left a paper trail on a host of subjects. In this, Judge Alito may be more like Judge Robert Bork than Chief Justice Roberts. Over the past several weeks, various groups have put together huge volumes of sources and analysis about Judge Alito’s legal opinions, his legal writings and, of course, his now notorious job applications to the federal government. Many of these are available free over the Internet and for those of you who want to learn more about Judge Alito than is available on the nightly news, there are several I would suggest.

The first place to start is at the White House Web site, which provides the administration’s “official” documentation on Judge Alito. The URL for this is www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/judicialnominees/alito.html. For those of you who want to read some of his judicial opinions, 350 of them have been put onto the Web at www.asksam.com/ebooks/Judge_Alito. The Yale Alito Project has done analyses of all 415 of his opinions. These can be accessed at http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog/. This Web site also lists a number of other relevant sites.

Two other sites are also quite useful. The University of Michigan law school has a site devoted to Judge Alito at www.umich.edu/library/news/topics/alitoindex.html, and the Library of Congress has a bibliography of Judge Alito’s writings with links to some full text at http://www.loc.gov/rr/law/alito.html.

And, of course, there are a great number of reports put out by various interest groups both for and against Judge Alito’s confirmation which any Internet search engine will turn up. Finally, if you want to know what 500 law professors think, they have written and posted a letter about the nomination at www.supremecourtwatch.org/alitoprofletter.pdf.

Good reading.