Anthony Lewis: pioneer in the court's pressroom.

• Author: Denniston, Lyle
• Position: The Art, Craft, and Future of Legal Journalism: A Tribute to Anthony Lewis

Americans with a sense of history, and some knowledge of it, like to think of journalists who open new frontiers in their craft as inevitably muckrakers, or fierce and uncompromising agents of radical change. If every pioneering journalist was an Ida Tarbell or Lincoln Steffens or Upton Sinclair, that perception would be right. Those pioneers had the courage to break the mold, to take on the power elites of their day and compel them to bend to the public good. Their journalism had about it the capacity to coerce reform, sometimes by the bludgeon of shock.

H. L. Mencken in his day did his fair share of puncturing inflated public egos, but it is remarkable how little social reform came at his instigation. His wit was deliciously wicked, and his fascination with philology could well be emulated by journalists of all eras. But his work was mainly for parlor amusement, not social improvement.

In modern times, perhaps closest to the muckraker would be Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, at least when he was a reporter before becoming a commentator or pundit and got into public spats with the White House. Woodward, together with Carl Bernstein, put an end to the practice of Washington journalists looking the other way when something did not seem right in public affairs, but finding out what actually had gone wrong required a dogged determination, and no weekends off. The list of post-Watergate reforms that their work stimulated is impressive, indeed.

There is another kind of journalistic pioneer, who uses the instrument of daily news coverage to de-fog history or unravel mysteries for ordinary people, to put the seemingly unreachable or inaccessible within the easy grasp of the average citizen. In this genre, one would have to put the war correspondents: Mathew Brady with his camera, Ernie Pyle with his pencil and pad, Bill Mauldin with his cartoonist's sketch pad, David Halberstam with his tape recorder.

A rarer breed of this kind of pioneer would be Joseph Anthony Lewis, who died in March at age eighty-five after a remarkably rich career with The New York Times, enlivening the sometimes-arcane world of the law for his readers. A somewhat aristocratic fellow, he had a perhaps surprising passion --and a remarkable gift--for putting the intricacies of law down where any Public Citizen could reach them. (In these days, perhaps the legal translator who comes closest to Tony Lewis in making law interesting to those who do not make it their profession is the irrepressible online reporter, Dahlia Lithwick, who does it with a naughty sense of humor that Tony Lewis would never have allowed himself to indulge.)

Journalists, whether they know it or not, and whether or not they would admit it, are profoundly influenced by the eras in which they live and by the ideas which make up their daily news conversation. Tony Lewis was America's witness to "the Warren Court," and it forever made him a believing liberal. (He may have been the only reporter covering the Supreme Court who would have understood why that Court was "liberal" rather than "progressive," which is the more fashionable word for what passes for liberalism today with its strong echoes of early twentieth century progressivism.)

Tony's genius was not objectivity; he genuinely agreed personally with the substance of what the Warren Court was doing to make the civil rights revolution and the criminal law revolution into constitutional realities. His copy showed that he thought the Court was getting it right, almost all of the time. It is too much to suggest that he was an apologist for the Court, but the majority almost certainly thought he was an admirer...