MOST OF US ROOTED FOR THE HARD HATS AND MAYOR DALEY:

A Search for Order, an Answer in the Law: Since his youth, Samuel Alito Jr. has been drawn to conservative ideas. On the eve of confirmation hearings, the first of two articles looks at the forces that shaped the nominee. (Dale Russakoff and Jo Becker, January 8, 2006, Washington Post )

It was May 3, 1971, the crest of the antiwar movement, and Washington was clogged with thousands of denim-and-fatigues-clad protesters demanding an end to the Vietnam War. Blocks from the Capitol, but far from the action, a handful of Princeton University undergraduates in sport coats found themselves in the wood-paneled chambers of Justice John M. Harlan.

Most saw the visit as a detour from their real purpose: to meet generals, lawmakers and diplomats and debate the justness of the war. One young man even dozed off.

But not Samuel A. Alito Jr. Harlan was the one person he wanted to meet when Princeton's politics society arranged the trip. Now the clean-cut young man with dark-rimmed glasses was transfixed by the justice whose dissents from landmark liberal rulings of the Supreme Court had become his guideposts.

"The rest of us didn't grasp Harlan's significance," said George Pieler, then president of the politics society. "The only reason I did was that Sam had told me."

Years later, Alito would write that his distress over the court's liberal activism under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1960s had propelled him to study constitutional law. Along the way, he would embrace Harlan's view that the court was usurping power that the Constitution had reserved for lawmakers.

At the time of the visit, this vision was hardly in vogue. After all, it was the Warren Court that had stepped in when legislators would not and declared segregated schools unconstitutional.

But Alito was not one to be swayed by fashion. As protest movements shook the world around him in the 1960s and 1970s, he held fast to the respect for authority he learned growing up in a New Jersey suburb in the 1950s.