Anthony Lewis.

• Author: Lithwick, Dahlia
• Position: His impact of US Supreme Court reporting - The Art, Craft, and Future of Legal Journalism: A Tribute to Anthony Lewis

In the obituary he wrote for Anthony Lewis in the New York Times, Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak explained that Lewis almost single-handedly revolutionized the way the Supreme Court was covered. (1) As Liptak put it,

[b]efore Mr. Lewis started covering the Supreme Court, press reports on its decisions were apt to be pedestrian recitations by journalists without legal training, rarely examining the court's reasoning or grappling with the context and consequences of particular rulings. Mr. Lewis's thorough knowledge of the court's work changed that. His articles were virtual tutorials about currents in legal thinking, written with ease and sweep and an ability to render complex matters accessible. (2) In his tribute to Lewis, Professor David Cole made substantially the same observation: Lewis brought with him "a new approach to legal journalism. He combined sophisticated legal analysis with an unparalleled ability to write in plain, lucid English, translating the Court's decisions, explaining their implications, and assessing their significance for a broad readership." (3)

Tony Lewis changed everything about Supreme Court reporting. He changed everything because he inserted himself directly into the conversation between the Justices of the Supreme Court and the American public. He wasn't writing for the constitutional scholars; he wasn't writing for the history books (although he might have been) and he wasn't writing to impress the justices (although he did). Instead, Lewis was a translator, an ambassador, who in the Warren Court era fashioned himself as the People's Solicitor General; he was the advocate for the little guy before the high court, and an advocate to his readers about what the Court should be doing for the little guy. With sophisticated legal analysis and an eye for jurisprudential trends and shifts, his beat was the Constitution, as much as the Court. And as a consequence, his fingerprints are all over the doctrine he was covering.

This is not exactly journalism so much as advocacy, and Lewis deftly played both roles, at a time when such advocacy was sorely needed and editors seemed unconcerned about the dual roles.

It's not just that Lewis's work was cited in Supreme Court opinions, because it was. (4) It's that his advocacy in certain areas elevated issues to the Court's attention. Richard Tofel, writing in ProPublica in March 2013 wrote that, after careful study he determined that Lewis was "the person most responsible" for the "one person one vote" revolution that began in 1962 at the Supreme Court with Baker v. Carr. (5) Tofel references Victor Navasky's book Kennedy Justice, to illustrate how Lewis went beyond merely penning a law review article on the subject to help guide the actual litigation: "Lewis actually lobbied Solicitor General Archibald Cox (whom he had gotten to know during his Nieman fellowship) and Attorney General Robert Kennedy (a Harvard classmate of Lewis's), and their aides, to take up a key point in the case on the side of the Tennessee plaintiffs." (6)

Lucas Guttentag, the ACLU lawyer who argued an important immigration case at the high court similarly told David Cole that Anthony Lewis "single-handedly elevated [the issue] to public consciousness through his series of columns on the intolerable consequences of the law and the critical role of the courts. To this day, I think his columns were as...