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American journalist (1927–2013)

Joseph Anthony Lewis (March 27, 1927 – March 25, 2013) was an American public intellectual and journalist. He was a two time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and was a columnist for The New York Times. He is credited with creating the field of legal journalism in the United States. Early in Lewis' career as a legal journalist, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter told an editor of The New York Times: "I can't believe what this young man achieved. There are not two justices of this court who have such a grasp of these cases." At his death, Nicholas B. Lemann, the dean of Columbia University School of Journalism, said: "At a liberal moment in American history, he was one of the defining liberal voices."

Lewis was born Joseph Anthony Lewis in New York City on March 27, 1927, to Kassel Lewis, who worked in textiles manufacturing, and Sylvia Surut, who became director of the nursery school at the 92nd Street Y. He and his family were Jewish. He attended the Horace Mann School in the Bronx, where he was a classmate of Roy Cohn, and graduated from Harvard College in 1948. While at Harvard, he was managing editor of The Harvard Crimson.

Following his college graduation, Lewis worked for The New York Times. He left in 1952 to work for the Democratic National Committee on Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaign. He returned to journalism at The Washington Daily News, an afternoon tabloid. He wrote a series of articles on the case of Abraham Chasanow, a civilian employee of the U. S. Navy, who had been dismissed from his job on the basis of allegations by anonymous informers that he associated with anti American subversives. The series won Lewis a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1955. Lewis returned to The New York Times that year as its Washington bureau chief. He was assigned to cover the Justice Department and the Supreme Court. In 1956–57 he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard Law School. The citation singled out his coverage of the court's reasoning in Baker v. Carr, a Supreme Court decision which held that federal courts could exercise authority over legislative redistricting on the part of the states, and the decision's impact on specific states. Lewis published a second book in 1964, Portrait of a Decade: The Second American Revolution, about the civil rights movement. In 1991, Mr. Lewis published Make No Law, an account of The New York Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 Supreme Court decision that revolutionized American libel law. In Sullivan, the court held that public officials suing critics of their official conduct needed to prove that the contested statements were made with "actual malice", that is, with knowledge of their falsity or with serious subjective doubts about their truth.

Beginning in the mid 1970s, Lewis taught a course in First Amendment and the Supreme Court at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism for 23 years. He served on the board of directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and its policy committee. CPJ awarded him its Burton Benjamin Award for lifetime achievement in 2009. He was chosen Class Day speaker at Harvard in 1997. Lewis also opposed journalists' advocacy of a federal "shield law" to allow journalists to refuse to reveal their sources. He cited the case of Wen Ho Lee, whose privacy was, in Lewis' view, violated by newspapers who published leaked information and then refused to identify the sources of those leaks, preferring to agree to a financial settlement. He noted that the newspapers said they were acting to "protect our journalists from further sanctions", thus privileging their own needs over the damage caused the victim of the false information they printed.