Anthony Lewis, a former New York Times reporter and columnist, author, and longtime advocate for free speech and justice, has died at the age of 85. A Nieman Fellow in the class of 1957, Lewis was a constitutional law expert whose groundbreaking coverage of the Supreme Court changed the way complex legal matters are reported in the United States.
After graduating from Harvard in 1948, Lewis worked at The New York Times for several years before joining The Washington Daily News. It was there that he won his first Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. He rejoined the Times in 1955 and remained for more than four decades, reporting on the Supreme Court, serving as London bureau chief and writing the op-ed column “Abroad at Home” from 1969 to 2001. He received his second Pulitzer in 1963 for his coverage of the Supreme Court and was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal by President Clinton in 2001.
Lewis’s books included the much acclaimed “Gideon’s Trumpet,” about the 1963 decision that guaranteed poor defendants legal counsel and “Make No Law: the Sullivan Case and the First Amendment.” In addition to reporting, Lewis lectured at Harvard Law School, Harvard Kennedy School, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and other universities.
Lewis was married to Margaret Marshall, former chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.