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Legal News

: Lawbeat

Greenhouse retrospectives, Parts I and II

By Mark Obbie

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Hours after appearing on NPR's Weekend edition for a Q&A with host Linda Wertheimer to talk about her career and where the Supreme Court seems to be headed, Linda Greenouse has published a personal remembrance of her 30 years covering the Court for The New York Times. It appears in tomorrow's Week in Review section, less than a week before Greenhouse's last official day before retiring and heading to Yale Law School to teach. Greenhouse's comments on NPR and in the paper focus more on the Court than on her -- properly so -- but here's one of the more original and telling passages:

[N]othing touched me as much as the arrival in September 1981 of Sandra Day O’Connor. I had never heard her name before President Ronald Reagan nominated her that summer to succeed Potter Stewart. Although I covered her confirmation hearing, she remained to me basically a blank slate. That didn’t matter. The first time I looked up from the press section and saw a woman sitting on the bench, I was thrilled in a way I would never have predicted. Her presence invaded my subconscious. I had recurring dreams about her. In one, she asked me my opinion on a pending case (something no justice ever did in real life). But mostly, she just had walk-on roles in ordinary nighttime dramas, her presence signifying what it meant to me to know that there was no longer a position in the legal profession that a woman could not aspire to.

The piece makes a number of powerful statements about the Court's role in our democracy, though practically none about the role of the press in interpreting the Court -- or about her own role, other than having been there a long time. That's both modest and appropriate, but it leaves for another day an independent assessment of what Greenhouse's tenure has meant for legal journalism.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on July 12, 2008 (boomark / email).