LEWIS, (Joseph) ANTHONY

LEWIS, (Joseph) ANTHONY (1927– ), U.S. journalist. Born in New York City and educated at the Horace Mann School and Harvard (B.A., 1948), Lewis was on the staff at the New York Times from 1948 to 1952. He worked briefly as a researcher at the Democratic National Committee in 1952, and was a reporter for the Washington Daily News from 1952 to 1955. In 1955 he rejoined the New York Times, for which he covered the Justice Department and the Supreme Court. From 1965 until 1972 he was the chief of the Times' London bureau, and from 1969 until his retirement at the end of 2001 he wrote one of the most widely read newspaper columns in the country for the Times' Op-Ed page. Lewis won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting twice, in 1955 and in 1963. Although never formally trained in the law (except for a year at the Harvard Law School as a Nieman Fellow in 1956–57), he lectured on legal issues and the press at Harvard from 1974 to 1989, and elsewhere as a guest lecturer. From 1983 he was a visiting professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He has also been a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. Lewis' wife, Margaret Marshall, the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, wrote the majority opinion in the 2003 ruling that legalized gay marriage in that state. As a journalist, the focus of Lewis' interest was on issues of civil liberties, particularly First Amendment (freedom of speech) issues. He won his first Pulitzer for reporting on the Cold War-era federal loyalty program, specifically about a government employee who had been dismissed as a security risk without having been afforded due process (Lewis' articles led to his reinstatement). His second was for reporting on Supreme Court decisions in civil rights cases. He published three books: Gideon's Trumpet (1964), the history of the 1962 Supreme Court ruling that all criminal defendants must be provided with an attorney if they cannot afford to hire one; Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution (1964), about the civil rights movement and the law in the years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling; and Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment (1992), about a landmark case involving freedom of speech, libel, and the press, decided by the Supreme Court in 1964. Gideon's Trumpet and Make No Law are both regarded as classics of their kind and are frequently used as college texts. (Drew Silver (2nd ed.)