New York Times Supreme Court Correspondent Adam Liptak on Legal Journalism
Adam Liptak is the Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times, where he has covered the Court since 2008. After earning his J.D. from Yale Law School, Liptak practiced First Amendment and media law before moving into journalism, first in the Times’ legal department and later as a reporter. Most well known for his column “Sidebar,” Liptak has become one of the country’s most influential interpreters of the Supreme Court for both legal professionals and general readers. The Harvard Undergraduate Law Review hoped to gain advice from Liptak, a seasoned legal and journalistic professional, and hear his insights on a rapidly changing legal landscape and increasingly powerful Supreme Court.
This interview was conducted in Fall 2025. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Harvard Undergraduate Law Review (HULR): Mr. Liptak, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. You’ve been covering the Supreme Court for nearly two decades, and your Sidebar column has become a touchstone for people trying to understand not just what the Court decides, but how and why.
I wanted to start with your own path—because you began your career not as a reporter, but as a lawyer. What was the key moment or motivation that made you say: ‘I want to be a legal reporter rather than a practicing lawyer’?
Adam Liptak (AL): Well, the truth is, I always wanted to be a reporter. I just did a pretty bad job getting from here to there. I went to Yale College, undergrad, and then worked as a copy boy at the New York Times, a menial but journalistic job, and I didn't seem to make much of an impression. I had deferred admission to Yale Law School, so after a year of being a copy boy, I went off to law school, still with the idea that I might wind my way back into journalism.
I worked my first summer at the New York Times company's corporate legal department, and then my second summer, and for four years after that, at a Wall Street firm specializing in First Amendment law, so doing work with journalists, but legal work. And then I went in-house for ten years at the New York Times again, in the corporate legal department as a lawyer, basically doing libel law and related things. So I practiced for fourteen years in journalism-adjacent law, and I continued to do some freelance writing, including, ultimately, for the Times itself. It was enough that the editor of the paper noticed me and my interest and asked me to join the new staff, which was a big risk on his part, because I didn’t really have the fundamental journalistic capabilities to start my journalism career on the national desk of the New York Times. It presented challenges, but it worked out, and so I did that, starting in 2002. I started the sidebar column in 2007—this is all still in New York.
Then my great predecessor, Linda Greenhouse, who covered the court for thirty years, retired in 2008. I was reluctant when the paper asked me to replace her, because she was such a giant, because I didn't want to move to Washington, and because I didn't especially want to be covering only cases that nine people in robes picked, whereas in my earlier job covering the law, more generally, on from the National desk in New York, I got to pick my own shots. But it turned out that you can't really say no to that job, and it's been, you know, as Robert Work famously said, an intellectual feast.
HULR: Linda Greenhouse had such a distinct voice and way of explaining doctrine. How did you go about developing your own voice after following someone so established? Did you want to continue that tradition or redefine it in some way? Do you feel like your legal experience shaped the way you approached covering the Supreme Court?
AL: I certainly think that having a law degree and a law practice is a big help. The Supreme Court Press Corps is maybe twenty-five reporters, I’d say half of whom had law degrees, and a small handful have actual practice experience. And at least in the early going, that gives you a leg up. I think if you do it long enough, you get the hang of it, with or without those credentials in that background. But it has to help in developing my own voice. You know, I flatter myself to think that I have a distinctive voice and over time, you develop ways of writing about the law in conversational English that doesn't sacrifice legal accuracy. And that's an iterative process. You know, the more you do it, the better you get at it.
HULR: How has your approach to your column evolved? What have been the most satisfying stories you've covered? Conversely, are there stories you've wished you'd handled differently, or topics you regret not covering in a certain way?
AL: So I like, and journalists like, to read about things that are distinctive. The apex of that is the scoop that you have. In my world, there are not a lot of those scoops. So what you aim for is to write something distinctive that sheds light on legal developments that people may not have thought about through the lens of actual people and their actual experiences. And you know, to shed light on injustice, to bring attention to people who say, have been mistreated by the legal system or have triumphed in the legal system, that can be satisfying. I don't have a good answer for you. I probably should. But of things that I've missed, I'm sure I've missed a lot of things, but you know, if the column, the Sidebar column, is great because it doesn't need to be pegged to something that happened yesterday, it doesn't need to have authentic news in it so it allows you to try to think through sometimes difficult, sometimes abstract issues and write about it for a broad audience.
HULR: Speaking of abstract issues, your work has often emphasized the importance of the court's legitimacy, its transparency, and the way it communicates with the public. How would you assess its current standing in those areas, especially given the past few terms?
AL: Legitimacy, transparency, those are the main criteria, and the way it communicates with the public. The court's public approval ratings have dropped in the wake of the Dobbs decision, along with a similar drop in other American institutions. People are not happy and are wary of the government. Generally, Congress has terrible approval ratings. Journalists have terrible approval ratings. The court has to be a little bit worried about that, because its legitimacy is tied to the idea that when it says something, people will follow its mandates, and yet it's not obvious why that should be so; it doesn't have an army, it doesn't have the power of the purse. It just says the force of reason, and it needs to be accepted by elements of American society, and we live in an age where that's not a given.
The court's transparency, on the one hand, on the merits docket, they issue reasoned opinions that lay out their thinking quite well. And I'm not one to think that the public is entitled to access to their deliberations if, at the end of the day, you get quite a developed explanation of why the majority think as they do. More problematic is the emergency docket, which often yields short, cryptic orders, not infrequently, without any reasoning at all, and that's quite problematic on transparency and whether the court is good at communicating with the public as such. The court's legal work is inaccessible to most people, and I don't mean in the sense of unavailable. I mean in the sense of comprehensible. That sort of journalism really needs to play a role in translating the legal jargon into accessible but accurate prose.
HULR: Do you think there's a particular structural reform, such as term limits, that could be imposed? There's been a lot of talk about retirement age, changes in docket control that could meaningfully improve how the court functions or is perceived.
AL: I think that there are good arguments in favor of either term limits or mandatory retirement ages. Every developed nation in the world has one or the other. It would probably take a constitutional amendment, which means it's quite unlikely to happen, but it would withdraw an element of politics from the court's work. The process of nominating and confirming a Justice is intensely political, and then allowing the justices to pick their own retirement dates to align with the president of whose politics they approve injects another element of politics; then you can't lose sight of the fact that justices who are serving into their 80s, like Justice John Paul Stevens, who was 90, run the risk of cognitive decline. There are perfectly good arguments for term limits or mandatory retirement ages, but it's really an academic discussion, in light of my view that it would require a constitutional amendment. There are people, of course, who take a different view.
HULR: Talking about the court and making it comprehensible—it's really such a fine line between the law and politics when you're reporting. How do you balance analyzing doctrine and giving the reader context about the broader political narrative? How do you decide when a story should focus more on the legal reasoning versus the ideological or institutional dynamics?
AL: So the answer is, it depends, and you certainly want to have the mechanics of the outcome: who won, who lost, the practical consequences, the doctrinal consequences. I kind of resist, in most cases, the notion that I'm writing about ideology, although there are political aspects to some of the court's work, and if those align or don't with the partisan affiliation of the justices, that's probably worth talking about.
HULR: You've noted in some of your other pieces that some of the most important shifts are happening in cases that don't make front-page headlines—questions about government power at administrative agencies, state rights, to name a few. Which undercovered or lesser-known cases do you think could have an outsized impact in the next few years?
AL: Regarding cases about administrative law, the Loper Bright case from a couple of terms ago. The case on the president's power to remove the leaders of independent agencies (Trump v. Slaughter). Some of that stuff is difficult for readers to understand and to understand the consequences of—those are challenges, but there's, as you say, there's major structural aspects of the court's work on the separation of powers that can easily be far more consequential than a culture war issue, like what story books should be in classrooms?
HULR: Mr. Liptak, this has been really great. Before we wrap up, could you share what keeps you curious about the Court after all these years? What keeps you going?
AL: The questions the Court confronts are fascinating, and the quality of the advocacy by the lawyers who appeared before the Court, both in their written briefs and in their oral arguments, is superb, so the inputs are very high quality. The court's outputs are interesting. You hope they're also of high quality, and sometimes they are, and sometimes less so.
HULR: Thank you so much, Mr. Liptak. It was a pleasure to interview you.