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Linda Greenhouse

Linda Greenhouse teaches at Yale Law School. Her most ­recent book is Just a Journalist: On the Press, Life, and the Spaces Between, a memoir.
 (November 2019)

IN THE REVIEW

The First and Last of Her Kind

Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg preparing to address a meeting of the Congressional Women’s Caucus, Washington, D.C., 2001

First: Sandra Day O’Connor

by Evan Thomas
Sandra Day O’Connor’s name isn’t heard often these days—certainly not at the Supreme Court, which she dominated for years from her seat at its ideological center, but where her distinctive brand of center-right pragmatism quickly lost its purchase after her retirement. Her replacement in January 2006 by the hard-right Justice Samuel Alito, nominated by President George W. Bush, has proved to be one of the most consequential seat swaps in modern Supreme Court history. During a panel discussion a decade ago, O’Connor observed with characteristic bluntness that her legacy at the Court was being “dismantled.” How did she feel about that, her interviewer asked. “What would you feel?” O’Connor countered. “I’d be a little bit disappointed. If you think you’ve been helpful, and then it’s dismantled, you think, ‘Oh, dear.’ But life goes on. It’s not always positive.”

The Impeachment Question

Robert Mueller

The Mueller Report

with an introduction and analysis by Rosalind S. Helderman and Matt Zapotosky

Impeachment: A Handbook

by Charles L. Black Jr. and Philip Bobbitt
Should the House Democrats proceed to impeachment despite the seeming impossibility that the Senate would vote—by the constitutionally required two-thirds majority—to convict Trump and remove him from office? That question confronted the Democrats from the start and stymies them still.

Wrongfully Convicted

Caliph Washington arriving at the Jefferson County Jail in Bessemer, Alabama, escorted by Deputy Sheriff Clyde Morris and Police Chief George Barron, 1957

Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted

edited by Laura Caldwell and Leslie S. Klinger, with an introduction by Scott Turow and Barry Scheck

Blind Injustice: A Former Prosecutor Exposes the Psychology and Politics of Wrongful Convictions

by Mark Godsey
Week after week, the story unfolds before our eyes: “Wrongfully Imprisoned, Groundskeeper Returns” (The New York Times, March 28, 2018); “$10 Million for Man Wrongly Convicted of Murdering Parents” (The New York Times, April 21, 2018); “Philadelphia Man Freed After Serving 11 Years for Murder He Did Not Commit” (The …

Who Killed the ERA?

First Ladies Lady Bird Johnson, Rosalynn Carter, and Betty Ford, International Women’s Year presiding officer Bella Abzug, and Torch of Freedom relay runners at the opening ceremonies of the National Women’s Conference, Houston, November 1977

Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics

by Marjorie J. Spruill
How did the Equal Rights Amendment, an effort born in bipartisanship, end in polarizing defeat? Clearly, the ERA prompted a profound debate about the place of women not only in the workforce but in the home, the family, and society itself, in the course of which the amendment became entangled with the rise of the religious right that helped to bring about Reagan’s electoral sweep. Was the ERA the cause of polarization or its victim? Or did it turn out to be something else: a catalyst for positive change in legislative and judicial attitudes?

How Smart Women Got the Chance

Students graduating from Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 1962

“Keep the Damned Women Out”: The Struggle for Coeducation

by Nancy Weiss Malkiel
Nancy Weiss Malkiel’s “Keep the Damned Women Out”, a painstakingly detailed account of how coeducation came to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, is an invaluable antidote to the amnesia that has come to envelop the subject. More than that, it is an important work of cultural history. It seems a truism to observe that so profound a change could not have occurred in a vacuum, and Malkiel takes full account of the social and political revolutions that were convulsing the country in the 1960s. But she digs deeper to show how, as the decade neared its end, the leaders of Yale and Princeton realized that the mission these institutions had long assigned themselves of producing the nation’s leaders would soon be unsustainable in the absence of coeducation.

The Bittersweet Victories of Women

Because of Sex: One Law, Ten Cases, and Fifty Years That Changed American Women’s Lives at Work

by Gillian Thomas
At first glance, the answer to the question “What is sex discrimination?” seems obvious enough: treating men and women differently, because of sex. But at second glance, considering that men and women actually are different in ways that might have some relevance to the workplace, complexities soon emerge.