Alito grew up in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, a suburb of Trenton. He attended Steinert High School where he graduated in 1968 as the class valedictorian, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and "summa cum laude" from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1972, completing a senior thesis titled "An Introduction to the Italian Constitutional Court" under the supervision of Walter F. Murphy. Alito then attended Yale Law School, where he served as an editor on the "Yale Law Journal" and earned a Juris Doctor in 1975.