While her artful analysis is typically reserved for the nine minds of the nation’s highest court, Dahlia Lithwick turned her attention to her book collection last fall.
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When liberal Justice John Paul Stevens retires from the Supreme Court, Charlottesville and the rest of the country will still have court correspondent Dahlia Lithwick, who covered John Yoo’s local appearances for Slate.com. |
“For years, the joke around my house has been that there are two stacks of books on my side of the bed,” she later wrote on Slate.com, where she completed an online “chick-lit” novel in roughly a month using her (many) loyal readers as muses. “One pile is about torture, Guantanamo and military tribunals. The other is bright pink.”
Lithwick is at her best, however, when seeing red. Now in her 10th year covering the Supreme Court for Slate, Lithwick is one of the most discerning legal columnists in the business, and certainly the most enjoyable to read. Each cunning legal breakdown—from her Slate columns to pieces in Newsweek and The New York Times that she writes from her home in Charlottesville—arrives wrapped in clever, direct prose. If artists shouldn’t read reviews of their work, then a few justices would do well to avoid the point of Lithwick’s pen.
Asked where she developed her personal sense of jurisprudence, Lithwick laughs. “You mean, at what point did I become such a flaming liberal?” In the current Supreme Court, Lithwick says that “youth is on the side of the conservatives” of the court. However, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009, “might prove herself a progressive.”
Fiction, however, is something she won’t take on again. While working on her novel, Lithwick says she told her husband, sculptor Aaron Fein, that the pair needed to stop talking after 7pm because, if they didn’t, “the voices [of her characters] would keep me up.” She already has nine characters in Washington, D.C. to do that for her.
