Linda Greenhouse, legendary New York Times reporter looks back on three decades chronicling the Supreme Court—including her run-ins with the journalism ethics police

When Linda Greenhouse started covering the United States Supreme Court for the New York Times Jimmy Carter was president Except for a couple of years in the '80s, she remained on the beat continuously for three decades. No other Times reporter of this era seemed so inseparable for so long from the subject she covered. Greenhouse is a woman of legendary intelligence, focus and seriousness. Right from the start, every story she wrote about the Court had two signature qualities: all of them were easy to understand, and all of them were authoritative. When she announced earlier this year that she had decided to take the buyout and retire, it felt like an indispensable part of the Times was falling away. This week was the first time in more than 20 years that the Court reconvened without Greenhouse there to chronicle its decisions.

In the New York Observer, John Koblin called her "one of the great New York Times institutions," and that is exactly what she is. In January, Greenhouse will become the Knight distinguished journalist in residence and Joseph M. Goldstein senior fellow in law at Yale. Her successor as Supreme Court correspondent is Adam Liptak.

FCP has known Greenhouse since they were reporters together on the Metro Desk of the Times in the 1970s. At the end of the '80s, she was attacked for participating in an equal rights march in Washington. Two years ago she was at the center of another commotion after she stated some obvious truths about the state of the republic in a speech at Radcliffe. Her critics (including the public editor of the Times) said it was inappropriate for a Supreme Court reporter to express sincere opinions in public. These attacks ignored the central fact about her work: nothing in Greenhouse's stories has ever been influenced by one of her personal beliefs. This is what the public editor wasn't smart enough to understand: havingopinions isn't what affects a person's copy; what matters is whether you have the capacity to put them aside when you sit down in front of your computer. That's what determines the shape of your story.

And that is also what makes me saddest about this reporter's retirement: the gold standard for journalistic objectivity will no longer appear regularly in the Times, as an indispensable example for all the rest of us.

FCP called Greenhouse to ask her to remember some of the highlights from her 30 years on the beat:

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How did you decide that you wanted to cover the Supreme Court?
I didn't really decide. I was Albany bureau chief and it seemed to me a good time to transfer to Washington—I assumed to keep covering politics, which is really what drew me into journalism in the first place. The Times had a different idea. The Master's program for journalists at Yale Law School had just started. It was about to go into its second year so Dave Jones [then the National Editor] proposed that I spend a year in that program. I hadn't thought of covering the Court myself —not because I wasn't interested but because it never occurred to me it that it was a possibility

Who are your other favorite reporters on the Court of the last 30 years?
I have a high regard for Nina Totenburg. Somebody who has been amazing on the beat is Lyle Denniston, who is now in his mid 70s. He now writes the scotus blog, which is the major online resource on the Court, and he's really great. It just goes to show you don't necessarily need a specialized degree. NBC's Pete Williams is very good. So is David Savage of the Los Angeles Times and Joan Biskupic of USA Today, who is working on a biography of Justice Scalia.

Generally speaking, do you think the Court is covered better or worse than it was when you started out?
Probably better, because the internet has facilitated a sharing of resources about the Court. There's access that did not exist previously. Everybody posts links to decisions and now transcripts are available the same day, which is really revolutionary. It used to be two weeks; that makes an amazing difference.

Did anybody ask for that before Roberts became chief justice?
Oh yeah—constantly. The first hurdle to cross for years was that the transcript would not identify the individual justice who was asking the question. It was just "the Court." The conceit was that there are no individual differences—it was the Court asking the question. And that changed under Chief Justice Rehnquist; we asked him to change that. I don't know if it was an answer to a request or just Roberts' sense of what should be done. He made the same-day transcripts available on the Court's website.

If they were to allow themselves to be broadcast on TV, would it be Roberts' decision, or the whole Court?
Definitely the whole Court

Is there such a thing as a strict constructionist? Is that a term that has any real meaning?
No, it doesn't have any meaning to me. I think it's just a label that people fling around. Actually, they don't really fling that one around—that sounds like something out of the Nixon era. Presidential candidates will say 'I want justices who interpret the law and don't make the law.' The fact is the Supreme Court is sitting on top of the whole judicial system, and it has an enormous amount of discretion. Typically, the court takes a case because the lower courts are in dispute over the meaning of that constitutional provision in that context, or the meaning of a federal statute. So if the meaning were so clear, it wouldn't be at the Court in the first place. They have to bring personal judgment to it. It's not like an "umpire calling balls and strikes" as John Roberts described the job. It's the exercise of personal and professional judgment on the hardest legal questions of the day. "Hard" defined as those legal questions on which the lower courts have not been able to agree.