Anthony Lewis with Friendly Medal

Anthony Lewis and Linda Greenhouse Become First Nonlawyers to Receive Institute’s Henry Friendly Medal

Anthony Lewis and Linda Greenhouse, both of whom won Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting on the United States Supreme Court in The New York Times, have become the first nonlawyers to receive the Institute’s Henry Friendly Medal. They were jointly honored for their achievements in explaining and clarifying the law in the tradition of the Institute and of the late Judge Friendly.

The awards were presented to Mr. Lewis and Ms. Greenhouse at a dinner on October 17 during the Council’s meeting in New York City. The evening included vivid recollections of Judge Friendly by Judge Pierre N. Leval of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and eloquent introductions of the co-recipients by Judge Michael Boudin of the First Circuit. Judges Leval and Boudin, both Council members, were law clerks to Judge Friendly. Following graceful remarks of acceptance by Mr. Lewis and Ms. Greenhouse, President Michael Traynor announced that the Council had also elected them to honorary membership in the Institute.

Established in memory of Judge Friendly and endowed by his former law clerks, the Friendly Medal is not awarded on an annual basis but reserved for those considered especially worthy of receiving it. Previous recipients were William T. Coleman, Jr., in 2000, Herbert Wechsler in 1993, Paul A. Freund in 1989, and Edward Weinfeld in 1987.

Linda Greenhouse and Judge Michael Boudin

Anthony Lewis is a native of New York City who joined the staff of the Times, where he spent most of his professional career, in 1948, shortly after his graduation from Harvard University. One exception was the period from 1952 to 1955, when he was a reporter for the Washington Daily News and won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for a series of articles on the federal government’s loyalty program that helped to exonerate a Navy employee of unjust charges that he was a security risk. That year he joined the Washington Bureau of the Times, where he won a second Pulitzer Prize in 1963 for his coverage of the Supreme Court, and in particular of the Court’s groundbreaking decisions on legislative reapportionment. From 1965 to 1972 his reporting took on an international focus while he served as chief of the Times’s London Bureau. In 1969, still based in London, he began a regular column for the Times on both national and international affairs, which he later continued from a new base in Boston, with frequent visits abroad, until his retirement from the Times earlier this year.

The author of numerous columns and articles on legal subjects, Mr. Lewis has published two major works on landmark cases in constitutional law, Gideon’s Trumpet (1964), which won the Mystery Writers of America Award for best factual crime book of the year, and Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment (1991). He is the author also of Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution (1964). A Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1956-1957, he later spent 15 years (1974-1989) as a Lecturer at Harvard Law School, and since 1983 he has been the James Madison Visiting Professor of First Amendment Issues at the Columbia University School of Journalism. During the Spring 2002 semester he was the Visiting Lombard Lecturer at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and taught a course there on the First Amendment. In September he delivered the 2002 Kastenmeier Lecture at the University of Wisconsin Law School on "Civil Liberties in a Time of Terror." Mr. Lewis is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Also a New York City native, Linda Greenhouse is a 1968 magna cum laude graduate of Radcliffe College, where she was an editor of the Harvard Crimson, and she later received a Master of Studies in Law from Yale University. She joined the Times in 1968 as a news clerk to the columnist James Reston. She was soon promoted to general assignment reporter and then for three years was the Times’s Westchester County correspondent. Later she spent four years in Albany covering the legislature and government of New York State, the last two as bureau chief. After a year as a Ford Foundation Fellow at Yale Law School, she moved to Washington as Supreme Court correspondent for the Times, a post she has held continuously since except for a short period in the 1980’s when she covered Congress. In 1998 she received a Pulitzer Prize for the excellence of her reporting on the Supreme Court beat.

In March of this year Ms. Greenhouse distilled her years of observing and analyzing the Court into a major lecture at Georgia State University. Entitled "Between Certainty and Doubt: States of Mind on the Supreme Court Today," the lecture described the Court’s decisionmaking as divided between a maximalist approach, championed by Justice Antonin Scalia, and a minimalist perspective, best represented by the views of Justice Stephen Breyer. She has lectured at many other law schools, universities, and colleges, been a frequent participant in judicial conferences and seminars, and served on the faculty of the Practising Law Institute. In 1993 she received the John Peter Zenger Special Media Award of the New York State Bar Association.

Since 1980 Ms. Greenhouse has appeared regularly on television as a panelist on PBS’s "Washington Week in Review." A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1994, she was elected last year as well to the American Philosophical Society. She has served on the Executive Committee of the Yale Law Association and on the Advisory Committee of Radcliffe College’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.

Both Mr. Lewis and Ms. Greenhouse are married to ALI members. Mr. Lewis is the husband of Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, a member of the Council, and Ms. Greenhouse is the wife of Eugene R. Fidell of the District of Columbia bar.

Judge Henry J. Friendly, who died in 1986 at the age of 82, served on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1959 until his death. He was a member of the ALI’s Council for a quarter of a century and an Adviser to its Study of the Division of Jurisdiction Between State and Federal Courts, Model Code of Pre-Arraignment Procedure, Federal Securities Code, and Principles of Corporate Governance.