Date: January 13, 2006
Senator: Witness - Kronman
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SPECTER: Thank you very much, professor.
We now turn to Professor Anthony Kronman. After teaching at the University of Chicago Law School and Minnesota Law School, Professor Kronman came to Yale, where he has been on the faculty for 16 years, and was the dean of the law school from 1994 to the year 2004. He is a Sterling Professor of Law at Yale.
He has his undergraduate degree from Williams in 1968 with highest honors, a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Yale, a law degree from Yale in 1975, when he was a classmate of Judge Alito.
Thank you for being with us today, professor, and the floor is yours.
KRONMAN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Leahy, other members of the committee. I am grateful for the opportunity to appear this morning and offer my testimony.
I have known Sam Alito for 33 years, since we met in the fall of 1972 as members of the entering class at the Yale Law School. Over the next three years we took nearly a third of our law school courses together. We worked on the law journal together. We debated in the moot court program. I had a chance to observe Sam Alito at close range and to form an estimate of his character.
Sam was hardworking and ferociously bright. No one, I think, would challenge that. But that wasn't the first thing that impressed me about Sam. What impressed me first and most emphatically was his generosity and gentleness.
When Sam spoke, in class or out, others listened. But when others spoke, Sam listened, and not just in the superficial sense of waiting politely until they had finished, but in the deeper and more consequential sense of straining to grasp the good sense of their position and to see it in its most attractive light.
Sam always spoke with modesty. But even when he was defending a position that he believed clearly to be right, did so with the knowledge that he might be wrong.
Learned Hand once described the spirit of liberty as the spirit that's not too sure of itself. That's a phrase that's always had a special meaning for me, and it well describes the quality in Sam that I noticed from the start.
I noticed something else and admired something else, as well, and that was Sam's faith in the law. Sam believed in the integrity of the law, and in the essential fairness of its processes.
Anyone who has studied the law knows that it is not a mechanical system; it requires moral judgments at many points. But there is all the difference in the world between a person who approaches the law from the outside and views it as an instrument for the advancement of some program of one kind or another, and a person who approaches it from the inside and whose fundamental leading allegiance is to the law itself.
Sam falls clearly in that second category. He had, so far as I could tell, no political agenda of any kind. I would have described in law school as a lawyer's lawyer. And if you would have asked me on the day we graduated whether he was a Democrat -- as I was then and am today -- or a Republican, I couldn't have told you.
My knowledge of Sam Alito is based almost entirely on my personal acquaintance with the man. But since his nomination to the Supreme Court, I have attempted, as have many others, to glean at least a sense of his judicial temperament by reading a few of his opinions. I haven't read many, I haven't made a systematic study of them, but the ones that I have read suggest to me rather strongly that the judicial temperament that I discern in these opinions is entirely consistent with the human temperament of the man I came to know and admire more than 30 years ago.
The temperament of the judge, as I see it, is marked by modesty, by caution, by deference to other, in different roles with different responsibilities, by an acute appreciation of the limitations of his own office, and by a deep and abiding respect for the past.
There is a name that we give to all of these qualities taken together. We call them judiciousness. And in calling them that, we recognize that they are the special virtues of a judge.
Judge Alito has been a judicious judge. And my confidence that he will be a judicious justice is based on my personal knowledge of the man and my belief that his judicial temperament is rooted in his human character, which is the deepest and strongest foundation it could have.
Thank you very much.
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