Adam Liptak - Career

Career

Liptak, a lawyer, joined The New York Times news staff in 2002, as its national legal correspondent. He covered the Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito; the investigation into the disclosure of the identity of Valerie Plame, an undercover Central Intelligence Agency operative; the trial of John Lee Malvo, one of the Washington-area snipers; judicial ethics; and various aspects of the criminal justice system, notably capital punishment. He inaugurated the Sidebar column in January 2007. The column covers and considers developments in the law.

In 2005, he examined the rise in life sentences in the U.S. in a three-part series. The next year, he 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.

He began covering the Supreme Court in 2008. He followed Linda Greenhouse, who had covered the Supreme Court for nearly thirty years.

He has served as the chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s communications and media law committee, was a member of the board of the Media Law Resource Center.

Liptak has taught courses on media law and the Supreme Court at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, UCLA School of Law, University of Southern California Gould School of Law and Yale Law School.

While working as a lawyer, he wrote occasional book reviews for The New York Times and The New York Observer and contributed to other sections of The New York Times. His work has also appeared in The American Lawyer. He has written several law review articles as well, generally on First Amendment topics. In 2012, he published a foreword to The Michigan Law Review's annual book review issue called "Agency and Equity: Why Do We Blame Clients for Their Lawyers' Mistakes?"