Five years into his tenure, Justice Samuel Alito is the one conservative on the Supreme Court without a flashy legal signature. We know what to expect from the other justices on the court’s reliable right: Antonin Scalia has his constitutional theory of originalism, often in the company of Clarence Thomas. Chief Justice John Roberts also tends to lead with big legal principles. Alito usually reaches the same results as the others, but he does it by being small-bore. “He’s the offensive linesman on the team,” a clerk who worked for Alito when he was a federal judge says. “He puts his head down and stays focused on the case in front of him.”

By operating one case at a time, rather than from a grand vision, Alito has proved himself to be the closest thing conservatives have to a feelings justice. In fact, it’s lately from Alito that we get a window onto right-wing empathy on the court — and onto conservative instincts generally about who deserves our solicitude. Through it we see that Alito expresses feelings mostly for people who are a lot like him. Republicans pummeled Obama when he named empathy as a quality worth pursuing in his Supreme Court nominees. But they don’t complain about Alito, whose record shows that selective empathy can be deployed in the service of piling vote upon conservative vote.

Alito attracted notice earlier this month for his lone dissent in the free-speech suit Albert Snyder brought against the Westboro Baptist Church for picketing the funeral of his son, a soldier who was killed in Iraq. (The church’s odious way of protesting homosexuality is to stand outside military funerals holding signs like “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.”) Alito sided with Snyder, and as the Cornell law professor Michael Dorf pointed out on his blog, the justice’s dissent seemed driven mostly by fellow feeling for the grieving father before him. To Alito, the emotional distress that Snyder experienced because of the church’s actions trumped its members’ First Amendment right to demonstrate. Alito placed himself in the position of the father: “Mr. Snyder wanted what is surely the right of any parent who experiences such an incalculable loss: to bury his son in peace.”

Alito sounded a similar note two years ago, in describing Frank Ricci, a white firefighter who sued New Haven for reverse discrimination when the city threw out the results of a test that would have promoted Ricci but would have elevated very few black and Hispanic candidates. In concurring with the court’s 5-4 ruling in Ricci’s favor, Alito wrote of the “personal sacrifices” Ricci and other plaintiffs had made — Ricci is dyslexic and studied many hours a day for the test — in seeking “only a fair chance to move up the ranks.”