(Posted September 12, 2011)

Adam Liptak, reporter for the New York Times
Adam Liptak, reporter for the New York Times

HUNTINGDON, Pa. -- Adam Liptak, who covers the Supreme Court for the New York Times, will speak at Juniata College on "Covering the Roberts Court: A Reporter's Reflections" at 5 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 22 in Neff Lecture Hall in the von Liebig center for Science on the Juniata campus.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

Liptak, who also is a lawyer, has covered the United States Supreme Court and the court's Chief Justice, John Roberts since 2008. Roberts, who was appointed in 2005, has been steering the "highest court in the land" on a more conservative path since his appointment to replace the previous Chief Justice, William Rehnquist.

The two most pressing interests in Liptak's career have been legal issues and the New York Times. He started his career at the Times in 1984 as a copyboy, a term that would now be called news assistant. He started at the times in 1984, where one of his first assignments was helping reporter M.A. Farber covera libel suit brought by Gen. William Westmoreland against CBS.

Liptak earned a bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1984 and returned to Yale to go to law school, graduating in 1988.

Liptak was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for his series "American Exception," an examination of how the United States' legal system differs from those of other developed countries.

He practiced law with the New York City firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel, specializing in First Amendment issues and litigation.

He came back to the New York Times in 1992, but not to the newsroom. Instead he worked in the paper's legal department, where he advised the company's other papers, television stations and new media companies on defamation, privacy and newsgathering issues. He also litigated media and commercial law cases.

He has taught media law at the Columbia University School of Journalism, the UCLA Law School and Yale Law School. He returned to the Times news staff in 2002.

Liptak was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for his series "American Exception," an examination of how the United States' legal system differs from those of other developed countries. He also has reported on the rise of life sentences in U.S. courts.

Within the Times, he served on the investigative teams that examined the reporting of Jayson Blair, who plagiarized and fabricated parts of many stories he reported for the paper, and Judith Miller, who was involved in inaccurate reporting in stories concerning Iraq's amassing weapons of mass destruction and in a First Amendment case concerning protecting her source in the Valerie Plame investigation.

He currently writes a column on legal uses called "Sidebar." He also has written articles for Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone and The American Lawyer.

Contact April Feagley at feaglea@juniata.edu or (814) 641-3131 for more information.