Nominee Has Some Unexpected Supporters

WASHINGTON — Samuel A. Alito Jr. was quickly branded a hard-core conservative after President Bush announced his nomination, but a surprising number of liberal-leaning judges and ex-clerks say they support his elevation to the Supreme Court.

Those who have worked alongside him say he was neither an ideologue nor a judge with an agenda, conservative or otherwise. They caution against attaching a label to Alito.

Kate Pringle, a New York lawyer who worked last year on Sen. John F. Kerry's presidential campaign, describes herself as a left-leaning Democrat and a big fan of Alito's.

She worked for him as a law clerk in 1994, and said she was troubled by the initial reaction to his nomination. "He was not, in my personal experience, an ideologue. He pays attention to the facts of cases and applies the law in a careful way. He is conservative in that sense; his opinions don't demonstrate an ideological slant," she said.

Jeff Wasserstein, a Washington lawyer who clerked for Alito in 1998, echoes her view.

"I am a Democrat who always voted Democratic, except when I vote for a Green candidate -- but Judge Alito was not interested in the ideology of his clerks," he said. "He didn't decide cases based on ideology, and his record was not extremely conservative."

As an example, he cited a case in which police in Pennsylvania sent out a bulletin that called for the arrest of a black man in a black sports car. Police stopped such a vehicle and found a gun, but Alito voted to overturn the man's conviction, saying that that general identification did not amount to probable cause.

"This was a classic case of 'driving while black,' " Wasserstein said, referring to the complaint that black motorists are targeted by police. Though Alito "was a former prosecutor, he was very fair and open-minded in looking at cases and applying the law," Wasserstein said.

It is not unusual for former law clerks to have fond recollections of the judge they worked for. And it is common for judges to speak respectfully of their colleagues. But for a judge being portrayed by the right and left as a hard-right conservative, Alito's enthusiastic backing by liberal associates is striking.

Former federal Judge Timothy K. Lewis said that when he joined the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in 1992, he consulted his mentor, Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. The late Higginbotham, a legendary liberal and a scholar of U.S. racial history, was the only other black judge on the Philadelphia-based court at the time.