BIO

Lincoln Caplan writes about the U.S. Supreme Court and other legal subjects for the editorial page of The New York Times.

From 1998 until 2006, he was on the faculty of Yale Law School as the Knight Senior Journalist, where he was the founding editor and president of Legal Affairs magazine. The magazine was a finalist in 2006 for National Magazine Awards in General Excellence and in Public Interest. He also taught nonfiction writing at the law school and in the English Department of Yale University.

A 1972 graduate of Harvard College, he attended Cambridge University in England as a Harvard Scholar in 1972-73 and received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1976. He clerked for the chief justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, worked as a management consultant for The Boston Consulting Group, Inc. and served as a White House Fellow.

From July 2006 until July 2010, he was managing partner of SeaChange Capital Partners, a nonprofit finance firm he helped launch that raises philanthropic capital for nonprofit organizations involved in education reform and youth development for low-income young Americans. It has been supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Omidyar Network, and other major funders.

The firm helped raise the philanthropic capital that allowed the charter organization Uncommon Schools, headquartered in New York City, to build a new charter public high school in Newark, New Jersey. It also helped raise funds for the New Teacher Center of Santa Cruz, California, a nonprofit organization that provides training and mentoring for public school teachers, and for College Summit, a Washington, D.C, based nonprofit that helps low-income high-school students get to and succeed in college.

While at SeaChange, he consulted on a pro-bono basis about a range of journalism-reform projects. They included an effort to set standards for bloggers at a new top-level domain known as dotnews; the new magazine The Atavist distributed digitally through hand-held devices; and a global digital news outlet for photographs, documentaries, and written reporting.

Mr. Caplan is the author of five books: The Insanity Defense and the Trial of John W. Hinckley, Jr., which (as excerpted in The New Yorker) won a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association; The Tenth Justice: The Solicitor General and the Rule of Law; An Open Adoption; Up Against the Law: Affirmative Action and the Supreme Court; and Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire, written with support of his Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been a staff writer for The New Republic and The New Yorker, for which he also wrote about other topics, including architecture, business, economics, jazz, and sports. He has been an editor at U.S. News & World Report where he oversaw U.S. News online and the magazine’s coverage of education.

He is a member of the editorial board of The American Scholar and, from 2001 until 2010, was a member of the advisory board of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. He is also a trustee of Hopkins School in New Haven, Connecticut, where he chairs a committee on admissions and financial aid. Mr. Caplan is married to Susan L. Carney, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. They have a daughter, Molly.
 

Fellows Finder