On October 31, U.S. President George Bush named Samuel Alito as his nominee to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Less than a month earlier, on Oct. 3, Bush nominated his long-time confidante and current White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the same job.

Amidst a clamor of criticism focused on her never having served as a judge, the 60-year-old lawyer withdrew her name from the running.

Having "reluctantly" accepted Miers' withdrawal, Bush was under pressure to present a candidate likely to survive the confirmation process.

Dubbed "Scalia-lite" -- in a nod to his tendency to couch staunch conservative legal opinions in less caustic terms than the outspoken Justice Antonin Scalia -- Alito presents the juridical resume Miers did not.

He has served on the federal appeals court since his nomination by then-president George H.W. Bush in 1990. The year after he assumed his spot on the appeals court bench, he voted to uphold all restrictions on abortion in Pennsylvania law.

The ruling requiring a woman to notify her husband before an abortion was subsequently struck down by the Supreme Court in a decision that reaffirmed America's landmark Roe v Wade case.

Before his appointment to the federal appeals court, he served three years as U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey. During the administration of republican president Ronald Reagan, Alito was both assistant solicitor general and deputy assistant attorney general.

A Roman Catholic of Italian descent, Alito was born and raised in New Jersey.

Biography:

Name: Samuel A. Alito, Jr.

Current Position: Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit

Born: April 1950 in Trenton, New Jersey

Education: 1972 - B.A., Princeton University. 1975 - J.D., Yale Law School.

Family: Married, two children

Career Highlights:

1981 - 1985: Assistant to U.S. Solicitor General Rex E. Lee

1985-1987: Deputy assistant to U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese.

1990: Confirmed to the Third Circuit Appeals Court in New Jersey

Notable Cases:

• Alito is noted for his lone dissenting opinion in the 1991 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the 3rd Circuit struck down a Pennsylvania law that included a provision requiring women seeking abortions to notify their spouses.
• He dissented in the 1996 sex discrimination case of Sheridan v. Dupont, writing in his opinion that the plaintiff should not be able to withstand summary judgment just by casting doubt on an employer's version of events.
• He was also part of a unanimous 1999 ruling on the case Fraternal Order of Police v. City of Newark, that Muslim police officers in the city can keep their beards. "We cannot accept the department's position that its differential treatment of medical exemptions and religious exemptions is premised on a good-faith belief that the former may be required by law while the latter are not," he wrote.
• Joined the majority decision in 2000, that found a New Jersey law banning late-term abortions unconstitutional -- although he noted any such ban must include an exception if the mother's health is at risk.
• Alito concurred in the 2004 ruling that Pennsylvania student newspapers should not be barred from advertising alcohol. "If government were free to suppress disfavored speech by preventing potential speakers from being paid, there would not be much left of the First Amendment," Alito wrote.