Note Worthy

As law student, Alito saw group dynamics shaping school religion cases.

While toiling toward his 1975 degree at Yale Law School, Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote his “note”—the heavily footnoted paper that is a major chore of a second-year law student—on U.S. Supreme Court decisions on school “released time,” or plans in which students are excused from public school to study religion.

The paper, which was published in the Yale Law Journal in May 1974, has now been added to the tea leaves being examined to predict how President Bush’s nominee for the seat of retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor might decide cases on religion—including those...