Pulitzer Prize-winning legal writer Linda Greenhouse will return to Yale Law School in January 2009 as the Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence and Joseph M. Goldstein Senior Fellow.
In that capacity, she will advise on the framing and development of the new Yale Law School Law and Media Program (LAMP), teach and participate in various Law School activities, including Yale Law School’s Supreme Court Clinic. She will also work on her own research about the Supreme Court and constitutional law.
Greenhouse has covered the U.S. Supreme court for The New York Times for the past 30 years, and has received many prizes in journalism, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Her biography of Justice Harry Blackmun, “Becoming Justice Blackmun,” was published in 2005 and named a New York Times Book Review notable book.
Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh said, “We are thrilled to welcome Linda Greenhouse back home to Yale Law School, whose spirit of humanity and excellence she embodies. For three decades, she has been not only the nation’s most respected legal journalist, but also the world’s teacher on the complex workings of the United States Supreme Court. She has the rarest gift for distilling even the most complex Court decisions and doctrines into language that all readers can understand. And her knowledge of the Court is matched only by her passion for accurate reporting and her fervent commitment to promoting justice through law.”
A native of Hamden, Connecticut, and a graduate of Hamden High School, Greenhouse majored in American government at Radcliffe College of Harvard University, where she was an editor of The Harvard Crimson. Immediately after her graduation in 1968, she joined the New York Times staff as a news clerk to the renowned columnist James Reston. In her early reporting career at the Times, she covered state and local government and served as chief of the newspaper’s legislative bureau in Albany.
In 1977-78, the Times sponsored her on a Ford Foundation fellowship at Yale Law School, where she earned a Master of Studies in Law degree. She then joined the newspaper’s Washington bureau as a correspondent covering the Supreme Court, a beat she has held since then, with the exception of two years covering Congress during the mid-1980s.
Greenhouse’s many honors include the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard and the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She received the Carey McWilliams Award from the American Political Science Association in 2002 for “major contributions to our understanding of politics” and the 2005 Henry Allen Moe Prize for writing in the humanities and jurisprudence from the American Philosophical Society. Along with Anthony Lewis, she is one of two non-lawyer honorary members of the American Law Institute, which awarded her its Henry J. Friendly Medal for contributions to the law. She received the Yale Law School Association’s Award of Merit in 2007.
Greenhouse is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society. During the 2004 and 2005 academic years, she was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, lecturing at colleges and universities around the country. She is a former member of the Yale Law School Fund board and serves on the advisory council of the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.
The Yale Law School’s Law and Media Program, in which Greenhouse will be Journalist-in-Residence, is supported by an earlier challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, to build upon the Law School’s longstanding focus on the intersection of law, media and journalism. The Law and Media Program is directed toward Yale Law School students who plan to be journalists, advocates for journalists, policymakers or leaders in the media industry; working journalists who seek a deeper understanding of law, media and policy; and scholars who study cutting-edge issues of law and media. The LAMP co-directors are Professors Jack Balkin and Robert Post. The Law School also offers the degree of Master of Studies in Law (M.S.L.), a one-year program for journalists seeking an immersion in legal thinking to better educate themselves and their audiences upon their return to working in the media.
Other Yale Law graduates who have combined law and the media in their work include Constitutional Law expert Floyd Abrams (1959) of Cahill Gordon, Emily Bazelon (2000) of Slate, Steven Brill (1975) of The American Lawyer and Brill’s Content, former FCC Commissioners Reed Hundt (1974 and) William Kennard (1981), Jeff Greenfield (1967) of CBS News; Adam Liptak (1988) of The New York Times and Jeffrey Rosen (1991) of The New Republic.
