Legal News

30-Year SCOTUS Reporter, Linda Greenhouse, to Leave NYT

By Dan Slater

We’ve always been a little awed by, and envious of, Linda Greenhouse, the NYT reporter who’s covered the Supreme Court for the last 30 years. Joining the Times in 1968, she began covering the Court in 1978, making her career there longer than any of the current justices except John Paul Stevens, who came to the Court in 1975. And now Greenhouse is moving on, to greener pastures. Here’s the AP story.

Reported first on a blog at National Review magazine’s website, it’s now been confirmed that Greenhouse, 61, is taking one of the buyout offers announced by the NYT last week. According to a story in the NY Observer, the buyout offer is worth $300,000.

According to Greenhouse — who won a Pulitzer for her Court coverage in 1998, and in 2005 published “Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun’s Supreme Court Journey” — both NPR’s Nina Totenberg and Lyle Denniston, currently writing for Scotusblog, have been covering the Court longer than she has.

“I don’t feel like I’m leaving anything undone after 30 years on this beat,” she said, adding that she has various academic writing and speaking commitments scheduled well into next year and that she plans to remain “actively engaged in thinking and writing about the court.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 28, 2008 (boomark / email).