Pulitzer Prize winner Linda Greenhouse will deliver commencement address

New York Times reporter and author Linda Greenhouse will receive an honorary doctorate of law from Penn State during Law School commencement on May 21, 2011. Penn State University President Graham B. Spanier will deliver the honor.

Greenhouse is the author of Becoming Justice Blackmun in 2005. Her latest book, Before Roe v. Wade: Voices That Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court's Ruling (with Reva B. Siegel), was published last year.

Greenhouse is the Knight Distinguished Journalist in Residence and Joseph M. Goldstein Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School. She covered the Supreme Court for The New York Times between 1978 and 2008 and continues to write a biweekly column on law. Greenhouse received several major journalism awards during her forty-year career at the Times, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard University’s Kennedy School in 2004. The American Political Science Association gave her its Carey McWilliams Award for “a major journalistic contribution to our understanding of politics” in 2002.

Greenhouse is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where she serves on the council, and is one of two non-lawyer honorary members of the American Law Institute, which in 2002 awarded her its Henry J. Friendly Medal. She is a member of the Council of the American Philosophical Society, which in 2005 awarded her its Henry Allen Moe Prize for writing in the humanities and jurisprudence. In 2009, Greenhouse was elected to the Harvard University Board of Overseers. She lectures frequently to law school and judicial audiences and has been awarded nine honorary degrees.

Greenhouse is a 1968 graduate of Radcliffe College (Harvard), where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She earned a Master of Studies in Law degree from Yale Law School (1978), which she attended on a Ford Foundation fellowship.