Adam Liptak

Adam Liptak (born September 2, 1960) is an American journalist, lawyer and instructor in law and journalism. He is the Chief Legal Affairs Correspondent for The New York Times.

Liptak has written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New York Observer, Business Week and other publications.

Early life and education Liptak was born in Stamford, Connecticut. He first joined The New York Times as a copyboy in 1984 after graduating cum laude from Yale University, where he was an editor of the Yale Daily News, with a degree in English. In addition to clerical work and fetching coffee, he assisted the reporter M. A. Farber in covering the trial of a libel suit brought by General William Westmoreland against CBS. including capital punishment. He inaugurated the Sidebar column in January 2007.

In 2005, he examined the rise in life sentences in the U.S. in a three-part series. The next year, Liptak and two colleagues studied connections between contributions to the campaigns of justices on the Ohio Supreme Court and those justices' voting records. He was a member of the teams that examined the reporting of Jayson Blair and Judith Miller at The New York Times, in 2003 and 2005, respectively.

He began covering the Supreme Court in 2008. He followed Linda Greenhouse, who had covered the Supreme Court for nearly 30 years. He now writes a New York Times newsletter, The Docket.

Liptak has served as the chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s communications and media law committee and was a member of the board of the Media Law Resource Center. University of Southern California's Gould School of Law, and Yale Law School.

Liptak's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Business Week, and The American Lawyer. He has written several law review articles on First Amendment topics. In 2013, he published an e-book, To Have and Uphold: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage.

Awards In 1995, Presstime magazine named him one of 20 leading newspaper professionals under the age of 40. In 2006, the same group awarded him its Crystal Gavel award for his journalistic work.

He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2009, and he won the 2010 Scripps Howard Raymond Clapper Award for Washington Reporting for a five-part series on the Roberts Court.

Stetson University awarded Liptak an honorary doctor of laws degree in 2014, and Hofstra University presented him with its Presidential Medal in 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Personal life Liptak lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Jennifer Bitman, a veterinarian, and their children, Katie and Ivan.