Adam Liptak (born September 2, 1960) is an American journalist, lawyer and instructor in law and journalism. He is the Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times.
Liptak has written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, the New York Observer, Business Week and other publications. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 2009 for a series of articles that examined ways in which the American legal system differs from those of other developed nations.
Liptak was born in Stamford, Connecticut. He first joined The New York Times as a copyboy in 1984, after graduating cum laude from Yale University, where he was an editor of the Yale Daily News, with a degree in English. In addition to clerical work and fetching coffee, he assisted the reporter M. A. Farber in covering the trial of a libel suit brought by General William Westmoreland against CBS.
He returned to Yale for a law degree, graduating from Yale Law School in 1988. During law school, Liptak worked as a summer clerk in The New York Times Company's legal department. After graduating, he spent four years at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, a New York City law firm, as a litigation associate specializing in First Amendment matters.