Adam Liptak (born September 2, 1960) is an American journalist, lawyer and instructor in journalism.[1] He is currently the Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times. In July 2008, Liptak was assigned to take over coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court following the retirement of Linda Greenhouse who had covered the high court for nearly thirty years.
He has also written articles for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, the New York Observer, Business Week and other publications.
Liptak was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 2009 for a series of articles examining ways in which the American legal system differs from those of other developed nations.
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Since Liptak, a lawyer, joined The New York Times news staff in 2002, he has contributed reporting and analysis on legal matters. He covered the Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito; the investigation into the disclosure of the identity of Valerie Plame, an undercover Central Intelligence Agency operative; the trial of John Lee Malvo, one of the Washington-area snipers; judicial ethics; and various aspects of the criminal justice system,[2] notably capital punishment. He inaugurated the Sidebar column in January 2007. The column covers and considers developments in the law.
In 2005, he examined the rise in life sentences in the U.S. in a three-part series. The next year, he and two colleagues studied connections between contributions to the campaigns of justices on the Ohio Supreme Court and those justices' voting records. He was a member of the teams that examined the reporting of Jayson Blair and Judith Miller at The New York Times.
Liptak was born in Stamford, Connecticut. He first joined The New York Times as a copyboy in 1984, after graduation from Yale University, where he was an editor of the Yale Daily News, with a degree in English. In addition to clerical work and fetching coffee, he assisted the reporter M. A. Farber in covering the trial of a libel suit brought by General William Westmoreland against CBS.
He returned to Yale for a law degree, graduating from Yale Law School in 1988. During law school, Liptak worked as a summer clerk in The New York Times Company's legal department. After graduating, he spent four years at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, a New York City law firm, as a litigation associate specializing in First Amendment matters.
In 1992, he returned to The New York Times Company's legal department, spending a decade advising The New York Times and the company's other newspapers, television stations and new media properties on defamation, privacy, news gathering and related issues, and he frequently litigated media and commercial cases. In 1995, Presstime magazine named him one of twenty leading newspaper professionals under the age of forty. In 1999, he received the New York Press Club's John Peter Zenger award for "defending and advancing the cause of a free press". In 2006, the same group awarded him its Crystal Gavel award for his journalistic work.
He has served as the chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s communications and media law committee, was a member of the board of the Media Law Resource Center.
Liptak has taught media law at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, UCLA School of Law and Yale Law School.
While working as a lawyer, he wrote occasional book reviews for The New York Times and The New York Observer and contributed to other sections of The New York Times. His work has also appeared in The American Lawyer. He has written several law review articles as well, generally on First Amendment topics.
Liptak lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Jennifer Bitman, a veterinarian, and their children, Ivan and Katie Liptak.