29th Annual National Speaker Forum and Fundraiser

A LOOK INSIDE THE CURRENT SUPREME COURT

Marcia Coyle is an award-winning journalist and internationally known analyst of the Supreme Court.
As Chief Washington Correspondent for The National Law Journal, she has covered the Supreme Court for 25 years. She is also a regular contributor of Supreme Court analysis to PBS The NewsHour. She has reported on such topics as same-sex marriage, gun rights, campaign finance, affirmative action, and forthcoming decisions, while offering astute explanations of the role of precedent and ideology in court decisions, or as she terms it, “the struggles for the constitution.”

Coyle’s reporting has garnered such national journalism awards as the George Polk Award for legal reporting, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for outstanding investigative reporting, the American Judicature Society’s
Toni House Journalism Award for a career body of work involving coverage of the nation’s courts and justice system, and the Scripps-Howard Foundation Award for environmental journalism, among others.

Besides her work for the Law Journal, she has written about the Supreme Court and other legal issues for such publications as Vogue, Ms. magazine and the New York Times Book Review, and she is a contributing author to a book on the Supreme Court, “A Year in the Life of the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Coyle’s book, The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution, provides a brilliant inside analysis of four landmark decisions of the Supreme Court—concerning health care, money in elections, guns at home, and race in schools. Coyle examines how those cases began and how they exposed the great divides among the justices, such as the originalists versus the pragmatists on guns and the Second Amendment, and corporate speech versus human speech in the controversial Citizens United case. Most dramatically, her reporting shows how dedicated conservative lawyers and groups strategize to find cases and craft them with an eye on a receptive conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

Coyle earned her B.A. degree from Hood College, Frederick, Md.; her M.S. in journalism from Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., and her J.D. degree from the University of Baltimore School of Law, Baltimore, Md.