I-Fave Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Stuart Taylor, Jr. said that the Republicans have been pounding away at Benghazi hoping to find the smoking gun, but they haven’t found it yet. Taylor said the report didn’t do much damage to Hillary Clinton. He also touched on the liberal SCOTUS.

Stuart Taylor Jr. is an American journalist. He graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, and is a regular columnist for The National Journal, a Contributing Editor at Newsweek, and a Nonresident Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He comments on legal affairs and often focuses on the Supreme Court, appearing frequently in other publications such as The Atlantic, Slate, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal.

Since 1980, Taylor has done reporting and commentary about issues ranging from the biggest Supreme Court cases to race, voting rights, mindlessly excessive criminal penalties, the death penalty, war powers, gerrymandering, guns, polarization, the perceived tensions between civil liberties and national security, torture, campaign finance, education, health care, impeachment, and a wide range of other issues. He has often been called one of the nation's leading legal journalists and has been known for breaking with both liberal and conservative conventional wisdom. 

Taylor was a reporter for The New York Times from 1980-1988, covering legal affairs and then the Supreme Court; he wrote commentaries and long features for The American Lawyer, Legal Times and their affiliates from 1989-1997, and for National Journal and Newsweek from 1998 through 2010; he has written (less often) on a freelance basis for numerous publications since 2010. He has been published by The Atlantic, The New Republic, National Review, RealClearPolitics.com, Slate, The Daily Beast, Harper’s, Reader’s Digest, and other magazines, plus op-eds for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and USA Today. He has been interviewed on all major television and radio networks. He taught “Law and the News Media” at Stanford Law School in 2011 and 2012 and practices law on occasion.

Taylor graduated from Princeton University in 1970 with an A.B. in History. After working as a reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun and Sun from 1971-1974, he moved to Harvard Law School, was a Harvard Law Review note editor, and graduated in 1977 at the top of his class, with high honors. He also won a Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship and traveled around the world in 1977-1978 while studying freedom of the press in the United Kingdom and Kenya.

Taylor practiced law with Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, in Washington, D.C., from 1978-1980 before returning to journalism in 1980 by joining the Washington Bureau of The New York Times.

Among those who have praised Mismatch are Judge Richard Posner ("the best researched and most convincing analysis ever done of affirmative action in higher education") and columnists Clarence Page (this book has "caused me to think again" about the affirmative action mismatch problem) and George Will ("This book probably will make constitutional history").