Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the court.

I'm John Carlo Conoparo.

I'm Zach Smith.

And welcome to SCOTUS 101, where we break down what's happening at the Supreme Court, what the justices are up to, and other things related to our favorite branch of government.

Welcome back to another episode of SCOTUS 101, and we have a very special episode for everyone this week.

G.C., what can you tell us about it?

Well, this week it was a quiet week at the court, but Justice Samuel Alito came here to Heritage

and was interviewed by our boss, John Malcolm, and we're

going to play that interview for you now.

So it's such a pleasure to have you here this evening, Justice Alito.

Let's begin.

What is it that first piqued your interest in the Constitution and in being a lawyer?

Probably a couple of things. Boy, that's going way back. But in high school, I was really

interested in American history. And of course, you can't understand American history without

understanding quite a bit about the Constitution. I was very interested in debating in high school, and I figured that was sort of

what lawyers do. And one year, the national debate topic was on the exclusionary rule or something

like that. So that required us to assemble arguments on both sides

of the question of whether it's required by the Constitution or whether it was appropriate

for the Supreme Court to enforce it. And I think I was also influenced by my father's work.

He was not a lawyer, but he was in charge of research for the New Jersey legislature.

So we often, that involved helping legislators both Republicans and Democrats to write legislation.

So we talked about that.

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