Samuel A. Alito Jr. is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Judge Alito was born in 1950 in Trenton, New Jersey. He graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in 1972, and went to Yale Law School, where he earned a J.D. in 1975. From 1981 to 1985 he was Assistant to the United States Solicitor General, and was Deputy assistant to the U.S. attorney general from 1985 to 1987. After a brief stint as U.S. Attorney for the district of New Jersey, he was nominated by George H.W. Bush in 1990 to the Third Circuit.

His name is occasionally mentioned as a potential nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States during George W. Bush's second presidential term. Because of his ideological similarity to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (a judge Bush has put forward as a model for potential future nominees), some have nicknamed him "Scalito".