By The Epoch Times | Created at 2026-10-04 00:11:39 | Updated at 2026-10-04 00:53:10
53 minutes ago
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said it took courage for the justices in the majority to proceed with the 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade after a draft of the opinion was leaked and the justices in the majority became targets of protests and threats.
His comments came in a series of interview excerpts posted online on Oct. 2, as the high court is poised to begin its new term on Oct. 5, and Alito’s new book, “So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country,” is scheduled to be released the same week. This term, the court will take up some of the country’s most contested legal issues such as gun rights, religion, so-called “gender-affirming care,” sex discrimination, immigration, election law, and the purported effects of climate change.
In the interviews, Alito also expressed concerns about physical threats against judges, presidential criticism of the justices, and said he is thinking about retiring, but offered no specific timeline for any decision he might make.
Alito discussed the leak of the draft version of the court’s June 24, 2022, decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which reversed Roe v. Wade (1973) and returned the regulation of abortion to the states.
The justices voted 5–4 to overturn Roe and a related precedent, Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). In the ruling, they also voted 6–3 to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. Chief Justice John Roberts concurred in upholding the state law but did not join the opinion overturning Roe and Casey.
The Leak and Its Aftermath
The draft majority opinion, which Alito authored, was leaked and published by media outlets in early May 2022. The leak was followed by several weeks of intense protests at the homes of the conservative justices who were in the majority, and a foiled attempt to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh on June 8, 2022.
“It required courage” for the justices in the majority to go ahead and release the final opinion after it was leaked “because of the implications,” Alito told Jan Crawford of CBS News in an interview scheduled to be aired on Oct. 5.
In a Fox News interview to air Oct. 4, Alito told Shannon Bream that the leak was “a grave breach of the trust that everybody who worked in this building had before that point, and it very predictably made the five of us in the majority targets for assassination.”
Police stand outside the home of Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh as pro-abortion advocates protest in Chevy Chase, Md., on May 11, 2022. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Alito told Bream he has an idea about the identity of the leaker, but said right now the evidence isn’t strong enough for him to come forward with it publicly.
Alito also told Crawford he has lost friends because of the Dobbs decision.
“It’s part of the job that you’re going to displease people by making decisions on controversial matters because one side or the other is going to really dislike you because of the decisions,” Alito said.
He said physical threats and harassment of judges “represent something new in our society and that’s quite disturbing.”
Crawford said that when political leaders from both parties discuss the Supreme Court, they treat the justices as “just nothing more than political actors trying to deliver victory to their team.”
Alito said that kind of talk “can be quite damaging.”
The justices are “not part of any political movement,” he said. “We are trying to interpret the Constitution as best we can and apply it in the cases that come before us.”
Alito said presidents used to express disagreement over Supreme Court decisions but then say they had to abide by its decisions.
Presidential Criticisms
Both President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, whom Alito said has “his own way of saying things,” have expressed “very harsh” criticism of the court.
“It’s been bipartisan,” Alito said.
Trump said this week that he regrets appointing conservative-leaning Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett during his first term.
“They voted against me too often,” Trump told Time magazine in an interview published Oct. 1. “I was very—I gave them the position of a lifetime, and they vote against me often. They vote for me too.”
He also mentioned Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor—liberal-leaning justices who were picked by Democratic presidents.
“The Democrats stick like glue—those three, they virtually never vary,” Trump said. “You can come up with the worst thing in the world and they’ll vote as a group. And while I don’t like it, there’s something I admire about it: there’s loyalty.”
By way of contrast, Trump has praised Alito and his conservative colleague, Justice Clarence Thomas. Both justices were appointed by Republican presidents.
Supreme Court Associate Justices Samuel Alito (L) and Clarence Thomas at the conclusion of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration ceremonies in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 20, 2025. Chip Somodevilla/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
Last month, he called the two justices “legends” after they were the only members of the court to express support for the Trump administration’s position in a ruling on the U.S. Postal Service’s regulation that would update how the agency handles ballots cast by mail.
Alito, who has been on the court since 2006, told Crawford that earlier this year he considered retirement and decided against it, at least for the time being.
“It’s something I think about, somebody at my age has to think about every term, but I thought that I could still make a valuable contribution, which is why I became a justice and a judge in the first place,” he said.
The 76-year-old justice said in an Aug. 7 interview in The Wall Street Journal that he will be staying on the Supreme Court “for another term,” after a quickly retracted NPR news bulletin weeks earlier falsely reported his imminent retirement.
Alito suggested to Crawford that a political calculus is involved in deciding when to leave the bench.
“It’s too hard to predict what the political situation will be and what any president might do with respect to a replacement,” he said.
Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
