The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction

Linda Greenhouse is a Clinical Lecturer in Law and a Senior Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School. She covered the Supreme Court for The New York Times between 1978 and 2008 and continues to write regularly for the newspaper’s Opinion pages. received several major journalism awards during her 40-year career at the Times, including the Pulitzer Prize (1998) and the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard University’s Kennedy School (2004). In 2002, the American Political Science Association gave her its Carey McWilliams Award for “a major journalistic contribution to our understanding of politics.” Her books include a biography of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, Becoming Justice Blackmun; Before Roe v. Wade: Voices That Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court's Ruling (with Reva B. Siegel); The U.S. Supreme Court, A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford University Press in 2012; The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right, with Michael J. Graetz, published in 2016; and a memoir, Just a Journalist: Reflections on the Press, Life, and the Spaces Between, published by Harvard University Press in 2017. Her latest book is Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months that Transformed the Supreme Court (Random House, 2021). In her extracurricular life, Greenhouse is president of the American Philosophical Society, the country's oldest learned society, which in 2005 awarded her its Henry Allen Moe Prize for writing in jurisprudence and the humanities. She also serves on the council of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences was elected as an honorary member of the American Law Institute, which in 2002 awarded her its Henry J. Friendly Medal. She has been awarded thirteen honorary degrees. She is a graduate of Radcliffe College (Harvard) and earned a Master of Studies in Law degree from Yale Law School, which she attended on a Ford Foundation fellowship.