Dahlia Lithwick

Dahlia Lithwick is a Canadian-American lawyer, writer, and journalist. Lithwick is a contributing editor at Newsweek and senior editor at Slate. She primarily writes about law and politics in the United States. She writes "Supreme Court Dispatches" and "Jurisprudence" and has covered the Microsoft trial and other legal issues for Slate. In 2018, the Sidney Hillman Foundation awarded Lithwick with the Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism, saying she "has been the nation's best legal commentator for two decades".

Before joining Slate as a freelancer in 1999, Lithwick worked for a family law firm in Reno, Nevada. Her published work has appeared in The New Republic, The American Prospect, Elle, The Ottawa Citizen, and The Washington Post.

Early life and education Lithwick was born to a Jewish family, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and is a Canadian citizen. She moved to the U.S. to study at Yale University, where she received a B.A. degree in English in 1990. As a student at Yale, she debated on the American Parliamentary Debate Association circuit as a member of the Yale Debate Association. In 1990, she and her debate partner at the time, Austan Goolsbee, were runners up for the national Team of the Year.

She went on to study law at Stanford Law School, where she received her J.D. degree in 1996. She then clerked for Judge Procter Ralph Hug Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Career

She was a regular guest on The Al Franken Show and has been a guest columnist for The New York Times Op-Ed page. Lithwick is Slate's legal correspondent, providing summaries and commentary on current United States Supreme Court cases. Lithwick also hosts the podcast Amicus. She received the Online News Association's award for online commentary in 2001. In a 2012 Slate article, she coined the concept of "Muppet Theory", which makes analogies of social organization to characters from the American puppet media franchise The Muppets.