Samuel Alito May Be Getting New Neighbors

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito may be getting new neighbors near his Long Island Beach property in New Jersey.
Several properties were listed for sale on Zillow in the same Beach Haven neighborhood Alito is known to reside in for part of the year.
All of the homes were priced at or above $1.5 million, far higher than the average home sale price of $361,282, according to Zillow estimates.
The properties that were recently sold in Alito’s neighborhood range from three to five bedrooms and occupy between 1,200 and 2,800 square feet roughly.
Across the U.S., home sale prices fell in August by 2.5 percent, but real estate markets like Long Island Beach remain pricey and inaccessible to the vast majority of Americans.
There’s some good news for Americans, though, as the end of August saw 1.35 million homes on the market, indicating a 22.7 percent increase from August 2022.
For Alito’s new neighbors in particular, they are joining a community that has already seen some contention surrounding the Alito family house.
At Alito’s home in northern Virginia, photographs revealed the property was flying an inverted flag just days before Joe Biden was inaugurated as president and after the Capital Riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
During the Capital Riot, many supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the White House alleging that the election was rigged and Trump actually won. The upside-down American flag was a common symbol of the rioters during the protest.
Alito, a conservative judge, previously claimed the flag was flown by his wife during a dispute with neighbors and said he played no role in the flag’s presence.
“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Alito previously told The New York Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”
Many pushed back on the flag’s existence at the Alito home and called into question whether Alito could appropriately rule on decisions regarding the Capital Riot.
“Justice Alito seems to have forgotten, or perhaps he’s just flagrantly ignoring, the fundamental truth of this Republic, which is that judges are not meant to be above the law,” Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor, wrote in a civil discourse blog.
Amid the backlash, Alito has attempted to dispel any concerns over his rulings on cases concerning Trump and the larger insurrection.
“My wife’s reasons for flying the flag are not relevant for present purposes,” Alito wrote to Democratic members of Congress. “But I note that she was greatly distressed at the time due, in large part, to a very nasty neighborhood dispute in which I had no involvement.”
Newsweek reached out to the Supreme Court for comment.
In New Jersey, where the Alitos are soon likely to gain new neighbors, the home has flown a different flag known as the “Appeal to Heaven.”
The flag stems from American Revolution days but has now been a symbol by some far-right conservatives.
“The Alito family flag controversy cannot help but suggest a very likely political bias in Alito court decision-making,” Robert Shapiro, a political science professor at Columbia University, told Newsweek. “The optics are very bad.”
A recent CNN report revealed Alito may be considering retirement amid the recent controversies.
Typically, Supreme Court Justices serve for life, but they can choose to retire at any point.