Perhaps the highest compliment I can give Justice Alito’s new book, So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country, is that it was worth reading not once, but twice. As a busy mother of six the only way I can get through most books is by listening on audio and I was grateful to get an early copy that allowed me to do just that. But I found his book so engaging and insightful that I went back over large swaths of it when my physical copy arrived so I could highlight and take the notes it deserved.
Drawn from nineteen speeches he delivered between 2007 and 2025—law school lectures, judicial-conference addresses, a Federalist Society convention speech, a handful of award dinners—So Ordered reads less like a treatise than like a long, candid conversation with a justice who has spent decades thinking hard about what judges are for.
Alito has called himself a practical originalist, and this book is inherently a practical one. He begins with explaining originalism, textualism, and what it means to be a judge, and he does it largely by showing what each of these things is not. Alito pictures an originalist judge driving down a highway with seven off-ramps—six of them wrong turns, such as “insecure originalism” (worrying so much about looking results-oriented that you warp legal analysis by putting a thumb on the scale against conservative results) and “archaeological originalism” (hunting for a decisive buried legal artifact instead of asking what ordinary readers understood a text to mean at the time of its adoption). He is not afraid to point out examples of cases—including Bostock v. Clayton County—where even his conservative colleagues have gone astray.
Alito isn’t shy about admitting that originalism was born out of a concern with bad legal results of the activist era of the Warren Court, affirming that a good judicial philosophy should yield good consequences, and that “because we have a good Constitution, originalism generally produces good results.” He also paints a picture of the long non-originalist period it replaced, when judges used a mishmash of sources to interpret statutes “including statutory text, legislative history, the purpose of the law at issue, and sometimes a generous dose of their own imaginations.” It is worth remembering how judges used to function in what Alito calls “the BS—that is, the before Scalia—era.” Otherwise it becomes easy to take for granted the exceptional Court we currently enjoy. Even on the rare occasions when the current originalist majority doesn’t walk in lockstep, it’s because they have honest disagreements about how to apply the right theory, not because they’re fundamentally at odds about how to interpret the law.
When discussing textualism, Alito advances a common-sense approach and dispels the fallacy that judges must be “strict constructionists.” He quotes Scalia as maintaining that a law “should not be construed strictly, and it should not be construed leniently; it should be construed reasonably, to contain all that it fairly means.” The chapter “Let Judges Be Judges” should be assigned reading at every law school. Alito catalogs a rogues’ gallery of what a judge is not—a scientist, a rubber stamp, a reformer, a theorist, or a crowd-pleaser—and shows how each one, in its own way, substitutes a judge’s preferences for the law. He concludes with what amounts to a summary of the book’s jurisprudential thesis: “Let judges be judges. For if they are not, our legal system, as we know it, will fade away.”
Though nowadays he is best known as the author of the Dobbs decision, Alito has long been a leader guiding much of the Court’s recent free exercise jurisprudence. His chapters on religious liberty emphasize its centrality. He traces America’s distinctive protection of religious liberty back to the Free Exercise Clause’s refusal to treat religion as just one of many kinds of opinions to be protected, in contrast to the declaration adopted by France in 1789. He is blunt about religious liberty being increasingly under attack and about what has displaced it: a “new moral code” advanced by secular society that treats traditional belief as bigotry to be stamped out. Readers who followed the Little Sisters of the Poor’s years-long legal odyssey or the Masterpiece Cakeshop case will recognize exactly what he means. The same alarm runs through Alito’s discussion of free speech, where he catalogs how European courts and American campuses alike have decided that offense is grounds for censorship. He criticizes the Obergefell decision as feeding attacks on both freedoms: “You cannot say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman” without raising eyebrows nowadays, in stark contrast to the recent past. Alito’s prescient dissent in that case had warned about this very scenario, in which people holding the traditional view “will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.”
The book is far more than a legal brief. Its final six chapters explore aspects of the American experience, in recognition of the Constitution being “a natural outgrowth of the society it was framed to govern.” In a chapter on the Gettysburg Address, Alito contrasts Abraham Lincoln’s iconic two- or three-minute oration with the more classically erudite, now largely forgotten speech—over two hours long—by Edward Everett that preceded it. Part of the same experience Alito catalogs is his own family’s story following their immigration from Italy. The justice keeps his father’s Italian birth certificate, signed for illiterate peasants who couldn’t sign it themselves, on display in his office. In a snapshot of four American lives in 1910, the justice places his grandfather’s arrival at Ellis Island four days before Theodore Roosevelt’s triumphant return to New York alongside his wife’s grandfather’s family in Missouri and Justice Thomas’ grandfather’s family in Savannah. Those very different lives were held together by “certain ideas” identifiable in “the promise of the Declaration of Independence” and the words of the Constitution.
The importance of religious faith is a big idea that Alito sees as “a cycle that moves from mounting hostility to ignorance but finally to awakening.” Hostility was evident in Stormans, Inc. v. Wiesman, where Washington state tried to force Christian pharmacists against their beliefs to stock drugs that could destroy a fertilized egg, a case in which the Court denied certiorari in 2016 over Alito’s dissent. Around the same time, Alito recounts an even starker form of hostility—the murder in France of a parish priest at his own altar—and the awakening he found in his travels: a run-down Hong Kong church packed for Sunday Mass with Filipina domestic workers who send 40% of what they earn back home and treat the faith the West has forgotten as the one thing that is truly theirs. What looks like faith under siege in the West is alive and growing in the East. Our country and “other postmodern societies” face a challenge that is “similar to that of the missionaries of old.”
Justice Alito does not seek the approval of the legal academy. He explains, in language any serious reader can follow, why originalism, religious liberty, and a disciplined judicial role aren’t abstractions but the hard-won conditions for self-government. It’s a message worth a second look.