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Legal News

: Lawbeat

Lewis to leave Columbia

By Mark Obbie

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Tony Lewis, one of the legends of legal reporting, is leaving the faculty of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism at the end of 2008. Dean Nick Lemann mentioned this on Wednesday at a meeting of the schools in the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education (Syracuse being one of them, in part because of Carnegie's funding of my legal reporting program). And Lewis confirmed his move in an e-mail, writing:

I'll be 81 years old and will have taught that class for 25 years. Travel has become more burdensome, and I just thought it was time to stop.

That class, as a generation of Columbia grads knows, is on the First Amendment and media law, co-taught with law professor Vincent Blasi. Lewis commutes from Boston.Of course, Lewis' version of slowing down at 81 is a relative concept. This week he publishes his latest book, "Freedom for the Thought That We Hate," a First Amendment history that builds on his existing, and excellent, history of free expression in "Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment." His first book, "Gideon's Trumpet," was one of my inspirations to be a legal reporter.Update: Jeffrey Rosen's review of Lewis' book leads the Jan. 13 Times Book Review. Short version: Lewis' "heroic view" of judges and his 20th century-ness blind him to the changing nature of speech and media, but he's Tony Lewis so the book's worth reading.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on January 11, 2008 (boomark / email).