New York Times

 

Editorial Observer

 

By JESSE WEGMAN

July 3, 2017

 

 

Lyle Denniston has reported on the Supreme Court since 1958. Credit Al Drago for The New York Times

 

 

There have been 113 Supreme Court justices in American history. Lyle Denniston has reported on 31 of them — more than one in four. “My wife and I ran a calculation,” Mr. Denniston said the other day, speaking by phone from his home in Prince George’s County, Md., a 30-minute drive from the court.

 

 

That’s about as far as Mr. Denniston, who is generally uncomfortable in even a dim spotlight, will go in acknowledging the scope of his own achievement. He retired last week after covering the court for 58 years — the longest run, by far, in a beat known for lengthy tenures.

 

When he started, in 1958, the court’s momentous school-desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education was only a few years old, and so was the current chief justice, John Roberts Jr. Roe v. Wade was 15 years away; Bush v. Gore nearly half a century. Correspondents sitting in the courtroom sent the morning’s opinions through pneumatic tubes to reporters downstairs in the press room. “That was a real challenge on a day when it was a fat opinion,” Mr. Denniston said.

 

With less than an hour to file after rulings came down, he composed his reports in his head and dictated them, in full, over the phone.

 

During his years on the beat, he has written for The Wall Street Journal, the now-defunct Washington Star, The Baltimore Sun and The Boston Globe. Since 2004, he has been the lead reporter for SCOTUSblog, where his clear, rigorous and scrupulously fair-minded posts on oral arguments and opinions quickly became required reading for devoted court watchers around the country.

“I never met anybody who worked harder,” Tom Goldstein, SCOTUSblog’s founder and publisher, said.

 

Mr. Denniston keeps a physical copy of every article he has ever written. Asked to put a number on it, he demurred. “I’ve been very prolific,” he said matter-of-factly; six decades of work eliminates any impulse toward exaggeration or false modesty. At this point, weight is the more relevant measure anyway.

 

When he left The Sun in 2001, he brought home six six-drawer file cabinets and 73 boxes of his clippings. The number of boxes has since doubled. He stored everything in the loft of a barn at the back of his property until his son Alan, an architect, warned him not to add any more.

 

“My basement is now in the same condition as my barn,” he said, “and my office looks about like my basement.”

 

At 86, Mr. Denniston exercises almost every day, a regimen he credits with delivering him through various physical setbacks: a life-threatening blood clot that developed in his leg after weeks of sitting in courtrooms covering the Pentagon Papers litigation in the early 1970s; a heart attack in 1996. But a difficult recovery from major spinal surgery last winter persuaded him and his wife, Pamela, that it was time to stop for good.

 

If the job of Supreme Court correspondent requires an immense amount of preparation, it also offers a predictable and mostly orderly process that Mr. Denniston says is crucial to doing the work well. When I started at The Times, I often found myself, by luck, seated next to him during oral arguments. From our cramped alcove on the side of the courtroom, we could see only a couple of justices, and it took a trained ear to know who was speaking. Early on, whenever I was lost in a complicated or arcane stretch of argument, I’d glance over his shoulder and try to make out the chicken scratches on his yellow legal pad. What was Lyle thinking?

 

In nearly six decades covering the court, he recalled only one time he was caught by surprise: the controversial 2008 decision in which the court ruled, 5-to-4, that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. The majority opinion, by Justice Antonin Scalia, relied on a historical analysis that ran against decades of legal precedent.

 

“The outcome was so strongly yearned for by Justice Scalia that I think you have to read that history as in the service of a foreordained jurisprudential result,” Mr. Denniston said.

 

Court watchers of all political stripes have said the same about many cases over the years, but Mr. Denniston is highly wary of efforts to politicize the justices’ work. He refuses to follow the common journalistic practice of identifying them by the party of the president who nominated them. And to this day, he maintains that their votes in Bush v. Gore, which decided the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, were not cast for partisan purposes — a view he admits is in the minority.

 

“If you wish, mark me down as a criminally naïve person about that,” he said.

 

Perhaps, but it’s a naïveté steeped in a profound respect for the court and the importance of the role it needs to play in a politically polarized society. It’s also a mark of how much he values the trust of his readers, who are always at the front of his mind.

 

On the final day of the court’s term last week, Chief Justice Roberts interrupted the reading of the opinions to honor Mr. Denniston’s service. Recalling that unexpected moment, Mr. Denniston was clearly moved. Yet he remained sharply aware of the unbridgeable gulf between him and the institution to which he has devoted his life.

 

“We are strangers to the courthouse,” he said, referring to Justice Potter Stewart’s observation about the press. “I’m not a part of the furniture and I’m not a part of the family.”

 

https://nyti.ms/2uB6aKA