In the opinion of some of us, Judge Alito ran away a little too fast from his letter of 1985. That was the letter, quoted by the Washington Times, in which Mr.Alito disclosed his views on a couple of questions being hotly debated. One of these had to do with affirmative action.

Mr. Alito wrote in that letter, addressed to Attorney General Edwin Meese, that he opposed the use of race and ethnicity as qualifiers for college admission.That was a vote against affirmative action. But – important to note – also a vote against the proposition that ethnic preference is an expression of constitutional order.

Mr. Alito would probably not have argued that a college exercising racial preferences was violating constitutional precepts: Samuel Alito was a conservative, opposed to the aggrandizement of pleasant laws into constitutional precepts simply because they are pleasant.

And the other point of vibrant contact in the letter to Mr.Meese was that Mr.Alito did not see anything in the Constitution that ordained the right to an abortion. This is the torch that has inflamed professional liberal critics, like Ralph Neas of People for the American Way, who is determined to keep Judge Alito away from the Supreme Court.

Now Mr. Alito has faced the two points, touching on affirmative action and abortion, by saying that back when he wrote that letter, he was applying for a job and took the opportunity to point out a couple of congruities between his positions as a lawyer and Ed Meese’s. When Mr. Alito went on to serve as a judge, he would be guided by other factors than his own policy predilections.

His backers have pointed out that while serving as a federal appellate judge, as he has done for 15 years, he has four times ruled on cases having to do with abortion. In three of these, he ruled on what would be called the pro-abortion side. Alito would describe that differently. He would say that he was governed by the arguments he had heard, and by precedents that bore on the questions being raised.

That didn’t satisfy Mr. Neas. On the other hand, nothing will satisfy People for the American Way except total immersion of everyone who has opposed abortion in a river of repentance.There is no way Mr. Alito can satisfy such as Mr. Neas. After all, Alito wrote in the 1985 letter under examination: “I am and always have been a conservative. I am a lifelong registered Republican.” His views on political philosophy, he said, had been shaped by the writings of William F. Buckley Jr. and by the position papers of Barry Goldwater when Mr. Goldwater ran for president.

Toward the end of his life Mr. Goldwater altered some of his views, especially in the license he came to give to the Supreme Court, as exercising definitive authority. My own views haven’t changed; on the other hand, I have not quite yet reached the end of my life.

What disappoints is the quite general assumption that Roe v. Wade came down on the correct side of the question. It is one thing to say (as I, for example, would admit) that Roe v.Wade is indeed what they now call a “superprecedent.” It is not going to be repealed.

But it is something else to say that the court reasoned correctly in Roe v. Wade. The constitutional scholar can with intellectual honesty take simultaneously two positions on Roe. The first, that it is the law of the land and will continue to be that for the foreseeable future. The second, that whatever one feels about the right of a woman to put in for an abortion, that right is not asserted in the Constitution of the United States, nor is it implicit in any reasonably argued defense of individual privacy.

It must be very exasperating, for such as Samuel Alito, to confront – as he will confront in January when the Senate hearings get under way – the need to forswear intellectual probity, by sort of nodding his head when someone asks him to comment on Roe v. Wade. He has the option, which almost certainly he will take, of saying that he declines to answer any such question on the grounds that future judicial decisions that bear on it will have to be made, and that therefore he is not free to discourse in advance.

That will almost certainly see him through, and it is a common occurrence when nominees for the Supreme Court are required to shape their replies to questions put to them by senators holding great big sticks. Samuel Alito, to judge by his career, and by his decorum at Princeton and Yale, is a man of singular thoughtfulness. Yes, when he wrote in 1985, he was doing so as an advocate seeking preference with a Republican administration. But those who are persuaded that Mr. Alito is a profound lawyer with an important career ahead of him on the Supreme Court would benefit from knowing that he hadn’t, in 1985, been flippant in stating his convictions on the matters of abortion and affirmative action.