New High-Court Nominee Has Championed Free Speech on Campuses and Questioned Policies on Diversity

By PETER SCHMIDT

President Bush's latest nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Samuel A. Alito Jr., is a federal appeals-court judge who has championed free speech on campuses while taking a skeptical view of policies intended to protect minority students from verbal harassment or give the minority employees of educational institutions an edge over their colleagues.

Many Republican lawmakers and conservative commentators cheered the president's announcement last week that he had picked Judge Alito to