Linda Greenhouse Pi Sigma Alpha Speaker
Linda Greenhouse, Pulitzer Prize-winning legal writer and Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times for the past 30 years, will deliver the 2009 Pi Sigma Alpha Speech on Friday, April 3, at the 67th MPSA National Conference in Chicago. Greenhouse is the Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence and Joseph M. Goldstein Senior Fellow at the Yale Law School.
A native of Hamden, Connecticut, Greenhouse majored in American government at Radcliffe College of Harvard University, where she was an editor of The Harvard Crimson. She graduated magna cum laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Immediately after her graduation in 1968, she joined The New York Times staff as a news clerk to the legendary columnist James Reston.
In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting in 1998, Greenhouse has received the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard, and the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She received the Carey McWilliams Award from the American Political Science Association in 2002 for “major contributions to our understanding of politics,” and the 2005 Henry Allen Moe Prize for writing in the humanities and jurisprudence from the American Philosophical Society. Along with Anthony Lewis, she is one of two non-lawyer honorary members of the American Law Institute, which awarded her its Henry J. Friendly Medal for contributions to the law. She received the Yale Law School Association’s Award of Merit in 2007.
Greenhouse is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society. During the 2004 and 2005 academic years, she was a Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar, lecturing at colleges and universities around the country. She is a former member of the Yale Law School Fund board and serves on the advisory council of the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Her biography of Justice Harry Blackmun, Becoming Justice Blackmun, was published in 2005 and named a New York Times Book Review notable book.
Pi Sigma Alpha National Political Science Honor Society is for college students of political science and government in the United States. The society has more than 687 chapters on college and university campuses in every state of the United States and in Guam. The society sponsors the Best Paper Award, a $250 prize for the best paper presented each year at the MPSA National Conference.