Linda Greenhouse to Deliver Annual Tucker Lecture at W&L Law

By Peter Jetton
September 19, 2018

Renowned journalist Linda Greenhouse will deliver this year’s Tucker Lecture at Washington and Lee University School of Law.

The lecture will take place Thursday, Oct. 11 at 4:00 p.m. in the Millhiser Moot Court Room, Sydney Lewis Hall on the campus of Washington and Lee. The title of Greenhouse’s talk is “The Supreme Court’s Challenge to Civil Society.”  This event is free and open to the public.

Greenhouse is currently the Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law and Knight Distinguished Journalist in Residence at Yale Law School. She covered the U.S. Supreme Court for The New York Times between 1978 and 2008 and continues to write a biweekly op-ed column on law as a contributing columnist.

Greenhouse received several major journalism awards during her 40-year career at the Times, including the Pulitzer Prize (1998) and the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard University’s Kennedy School (2004). In 2002, the American Political Science Association gave her its Carey McWilliams Award for “a major journalistic contribution to our understanding of politics.”

Her books include a biography of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, “Becoming Justice Blackmun”; “Before Roe v. Wade: Voices That Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling” (with Reva B. Siegel); “The U.S. Supreme Court, A Very Short Introduction,” published by Oxford University Press in 2012; and “The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right,” with Michael J. Graetz, published in 2016. Her latest book is “Just a Journalist: Reflections on the Press, Life, and the Spaces Between,” published by Harvard University Press in 2017.

Greenhouse is president of the American Philosophical Society, the country’s oldest learned society, which in 2005 awarded her its Henry Allen Moe Prize for writing in jurisprudence and the humanities. She also serves on the council of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the national Senate of Phi Beta Kappa, and is one of two non-lawyer honorary members elected to the American Law Institute, which in 2002 awarded her its Henry J. Friendly Medal.

She is a 1968 graduate of Radcliffe College (Harvard) and earned a Master of Studies in Law degree from Yale Law School (1978), which she attended on a Ford Foundation fellowship.

The Tucker Lecture at Washington and Lee School of Law was first established by the W&L Board of Trustees in 1949 to mark the bicentennial of the University and the centennial of the Law School. It was named after John Randolph Tucker, hired in 1870 as the second teacher in legal education and named the first dean of the Washington and Law University School of Law in 1893.