A successor to Greenhouse

A successor to Greenhouse

Friday, April 4th, 2008 3:47 pm | Lyle Denniston

The New York Times indicated on Friday that its new Supreme Court reporter will be Adam Liptak, succeeding Linda Greenhouse, who is headed for an academic appointment at Yale Law School. Mr. Liptak has been The Times’ national legal correspondent.

The internal announcement of the appointment follows (with a few family details omitted for privacy purposes):

“Dean Baquet is pleased to announce that Adam Liptak will be the next Supreme Court reporter, succeeding the estimable Linda Greenhouse.

“By now it is no surprise that Linda Greenhouse will be leaving us for academia. And it is no exaggeration to say that Linda’s run in the Supreme Court was historic. She set the standard, making one of The Times’s premier beats even more vital to the paper, and the country. All I’ll say is that if you want to see the work of someone with total and majestic command of a subject, take a look at Linda’s coverage of the court’s role in Bush v. Gore. We’ll have a lot more to say as we celebrate Linda’s career in the coming months.

“We think we have found exactly the right person to succeed Linda. I am pleased to announce that Adam Liptak will be the paper’s Supreme Court reporter. If Adam’s time as national legal correspondent is any measure, he will continue to make coverage of the court one of the paper’s distinguishing features, something we do better than anyone else in the country.

“Since joining the newsroom in 2002, Adam has covered the Valerie Wilson case and the Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito. He has roamed the country bringing life to musty legal cases and fights over judicial ethics, and produced major projects on the criminal justice system. He has also written a must-read column, Sidebar, that has been cited on the floor of the Senate, in Federal appeals and district court decisions, in editorials in The Times and The Washington Post, and on the Colbert Report (I kid you not).

“Before joining the newsroom, Adam was one of our lawyers. And before that he was an associate at the New York firm of Cahill Gordon and Reindel. The resume is impressive. But what impressed me most in my discussions with Adam was his remarkable ability to talk about the law with sweep and simplicity. It was striking that these are the precise qualities that make Linda such a great reporter.”

NOTE: The Supreme Court’s internal newsletter, “Oyez! Oyez!”, had this news earlier in the day Friday.