December 7, 2024

Anthony Lewis, Who Transformed Coverage of the Supreme Court, Dies at 85

The cause was complications of renal and heart failure, said his wife, Margaret H. Marshall, a retired chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

Mr. Lewis brought passionate engagement to his two great themes: justice and the role of the press in a democracy. His column, called “At Home Abroad” or “Abroad at Home” depending on where he was writing from, appeared on the Op-Ed page of The Times from 1969 to 2001. His voice was liberal, learned, conversational and direct.

As a reporter, Mr. Lewis brought an entirely new approach to coverage of the Supreme Court, for which he won his second Pulitzer, in 1963.

“He brought context to the law,” said Ronald K. L. Collins, a scholar at the University of Washington who compiled a bibliography of Mr. Lewis’s work. “He had an incredible talent in making the law not only intelligible but also in making it compelling.”

Mr. Lewis’s thorough knowledge of the court’s work allowed him to write authoritatively and accessibly about difficult points.

“He’s as clear a writer as I think I know,” said Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor of The Times. “There’s a kind of lucidity and directness to his prose. You learned an awful lot of law just from reading Tony Lewis’s accounts of opinions.”

Mr. Lewis wrote several books, two of them classic accounts of landmark decisions of the Warren Court, which he revered. Chief Justice Earl Warren led the Supreme Court from 1953 to 1969, corresponding almost precisely with Mr. Lewis’s years in Washington.

One of those books, “Gideon’s Trumpet,” concerned Gideon v. Wainwright, the 1963 decision that guaranteed lawyers to poor defendants charged with serious crimes. It has never been out of print since it was published in 1964.

“There must have been tens of thousands of college students who got it as a graduation gift before going off to law school,” said Yale Kamisar, an authority on criminal procedure who has taught at the University of Michigan and the University of San Diego.

The second book on a Warren Court decision, “Make No Law” in 1991, was about New York Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 decision that revolutionized American libel law.

Mr. Collins said Mr. Lewis’s coverage had helped explain and expand the court’s impact.

“You cannot talk about the legacy of the Warren Court and not talk about Tony Lewis,” Mr. Collins said. “He was just part and parcel of it. He was part of ushering in that constitutional revolution in civil rights and civil liberties from Brown v. Board of Education to Miranda v. Arizona.”

Joseph Anthony Lewis was born in New York City on March 27, 1927. He attended Horace Mann School in the Bronx and graduated from Harvard College in 1948. He joined The Times as an editor in what was then the paper’s Sunday department, but he left after four years to work on Adlai Stevenson’s 1952 presidential campaign. After that he was hired by The Washington Daily News, a lively afternoon tabloid, and won his first Pulitzer there, in 1955, when he was 28.

The prize was for a series of articles on Abraham Chasanow, a Navy employee unjustly accused of being a security risk. The Navy eventually cleared and reinstated Mr. Chasanow, who credited Mr. Lewis’s work for his vindication.

Mr. Lewis returned to The Times that year, hired by James B. Reston, the Washington bureau chief, to cover the Justice Department and the Supreme Court. Mr. Reston soon sent him off to Harvard Law School on a Nieman fellowship in 1956 and 1957 to study law “with special reference to the Supreme Court,” The Times reported.

Mr. Lewis’s coverage of the court impressed Justice Felix Frankfurter, who called Mr. Reston. “I can’t believe what this young man achieved,” Justice Frankfurter said, as Mr. Reston recalled in his memoir, “Deadline.” “There are not two justices of this court who have such a grasp of these cases.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/us/anthony-lewis-pulitzer-prize-winning-columnist-dies-at-85.html?partner=rss&emc=rss