Senators say Alito voiced respect for Roe

WASHINGTON -- Two New England senators said Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. told them yesterday that the Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision is a precedent that deserves ''great respect," but the Supreme Court nominee declined to say whether he would vote to overturn the 1973 ruling.

Senators Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, and Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, also said they saw no reason to allow opponents to block Alito using procedural maneuvers. Both senators are members of the ''Gang of 14," a bipartisan group of moderates who forged a compromise that averted a showdown over blocked judicial nominations earlier this year.

Alito met privately with the senators, both supporters of abortion rights. Afterward Lieberman quoted Alito as having told him that Roe v. Wade ''was a precedent on which people, a lot of people, relied . . . for decades and therefore deserved great respect."

Collins quoted Alito as having told her, in the context of Roe v. Wade, ''that he has tremendous respect for precedent and that his approach is to not overturn cases due to a disagreement with how they were originally decided."

His views on abortion rights and willingness to overturn precedent is expected to be a major focus of his confirmation hearings in January. Several abortion rights groups oppose his confirmation to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, an abortion rights supporter.

Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said Americans should not trust Alito's comments on Roe, noting Justice Clarence Thomas spoke of respecting precedent during his Senate hearings in 1991, but voted to overturn Roe a year later.

''Mr. Alito is making the standard political move of 'going centrist' after his nomination," she said. ''The hard-line antichoice base secured his nomination, and now Alito is courting the votes of moderate senators who respect a woman's right to choose and respect the court for adhering to precedent. . . . If Alito's backers -- the ones who forced Harriet Miers' withdrawal -- are so delighted with him, would he be so respectful of precedents and women's freedom if he is confirmed?"

Alito's conservative supporters, moving quickly to discount the comments by Collins and Lieberman, distributed an essay to antiabortion activists.

The essay's author, Wendy Long, chief counsel of the conservative Judicial Confirmations Network, declared that the senators' ''hearsay" accounts of Alito's comments on paying respect to the precedential value of Roe v. Wade signified nothing.

''One measure of the amount of 'respect' due any particular precedent is how well it has worked: i.e., has it actually 'settled' anything?" Long wrote. ''Roe appears not to have settled very much at all; indeed, the pot only seems to boil more furiously each year, and the cases and the calls to overturn Roe never end."

In another development, Princeton University announced that it had recovered Alito's senior undergraduate thesis, entitled, ''An Introduction to the Italian Constitutional Court." The 1972 student work had been lost during the 1970s, but Alito's thesis adviser discovered a copy and gave it to the university library, which made it available on its website.

Most of the document is a recounting of the history of the Italian court, but the work offers a few new hints at Alito's early thinking about constitutional judges. In its preface, for example, the young Alito wrote that it is a ''myth" that a court is a ''disinterested finder of the law" rather than ''a political body."

Alito offered further clues to his early thinking in a chapter that focused on how the Italian Constitutional Court went from upholding statutes that comported with Catholic Church teachings on moral issues -- contraception, adultery, divorce -- to striking them down as its political make-up changed in the 1960s.

Alito chose to conclude the chapter by quoting, without adding his own comment, a Vatican editorialist's blistering critique of the justices for their inconsistency and for allegedly applying not the law but ''the political ideas of the party . . . to which they belonged."

The young future judge also directly commented on the US Supreme Court in a section discussing an earlier decision by the Italian court to uphold a law forbidding the discussion of birth control as offensive to public decency. The court had found the restriction did not offend a provision of the Italian Constitution guaranteeing freedom of expression.

In the case, Alito wrote, the court was ''engaging in the sort of procrustean construction which is common for the United States Supreme Court." A dictionary defines ''procrustean" as ''marked by arbitrary and often ruthless disregard of individual differences or special circumstances."

Globe wire services contributed to this report.