January|February 2003



Anthony Lewis retired last year from The New York Times, where he was a columnist for 32 years. In the legal world, which has been honoring him with awards and attention, he made his reputation as the Times's first Supreme Court specialist, covering it from 1957 to 1964. In the words of University of Texas professor L.A. Powe Jr., he was the first reporter to see the court's decisions "as part of a continuing constitutional process where reasons and reasoning mattered."

Baker v. Carr is the 1962 case in which the justices ruled that they had authority to take on the subject of reapportionment, only 16 years after the court had called it "a political question" best left to the legislature. In Tennessee, where the case originated, the number of voters in legislative districts ranged from 42,298 to 2,340, so some votes counted 18 times as much as those in another district. With similar imbalances in every state in the Union, the case had an impact on fair representation throughout the country. Earl Warren called the court's ruling "the most vital" of his tenure as Chief Justice.

Lewis's coverage of the case explained why the migration of Americans from farms to cities had left districts badly apportioned, and how reapportionment of state legislatures was likely to transform Congress. For his reporting on the subject, Lewis won his second Pulitzer Prize in 1963.

But Lewis did more than just report on the case. At the beginning of the Kennedy Administration, since the federal government wasn't a party in the case, the Justice Department had to decide which side to support. Archibald Cox, the new solicitor general, had strong reservations about asking the court to tackle the problem because of the "political question" precedent.

Lewis disagreed with Cox's view. In 1958, he had written what Victor Navasky, author of Kennedy Justice, called "the definitive analysis of reapportionment" for the Harvard Law Review. He argued that because state legislatures would never do away with the "growing evil" of inequitable districts, the court had "the power and the duty to fill this vacuum."

Navasky writes that Lewis "shed any pretense at objectivity" and "did not hesitate to let either the Solicitor"—Cox, who was Lewis's close friend—"or the Attorney General"—Robert Kennedy, his college classmate—"know how he felt about the matter." Lewis and Cox were both in the courtroom when the court ruled that each state district had to have roughly the same number of people. The Times man passed the solicitor general a note, asking him how it felt to be at "the second American constitutional convention."

As his remarkable note to Cox indicates, Lewis believed that the Warren Court was shaping law with the highest sense of purpose, helping to resolve the largest issues in the nation's life, from racial segregation to the workings of democracy. Perhaps it was his confidence in the historic importance of the court's work that convinced him to cross the line between journalism and politics so audaciously.

But Lewis's impassioned writing was advocacy enough. In Gideon's Trumpet, his book about Gideon v. Wainwright, the 1963 case in which the court found that poor defendants in state criminal trials had a right to counsel, Lewis described the "fundamental change" taking place in the "dimensions of individual liberty." In Make No Law, Lewis told the story of the 1964 libel case that threatened to shut down the Times. To him, the ruling in the case was "a transforming judgment" that "ours is an open society, whose citizens may say what they wish about those who temporarily govern them." These classics depict the Supreme Court as a great institution, a pillar of progress worthy of championing with spare yet romantic eloquence.

Few academics or journalists think of the Rehnquist Court the way Lewis thought of the court he covered. Some scholars applaud the justices for rejecting the broad rulings of the Warren Court in favor of narrow steps in their decision-making and, as a result, for encouraging debate about big issues. But the current court is far better known for stumbles like Bush v. Gore, a political decision in which reasoning didn't matter, and for gutting protections under the banner of federalism.

After his last column, Lewis offered a melancholy confession to a Times reporter: "I have lost my faith in the idea of progress." His shift in mood about the court might be the lament of a liberal whose hopes have been dashed by a conservative turn, a turn that the midterm elections will surely perpetuate. But Lewis's gloom isn't only about politics. It's hard to imagine a journalist of any political stripe writing about today's court with the transcendence that characterized Lewis's work on the Warren Court—and not just because writers of his ability are always in short supply.