Lewis had an impact on his fellow students while at the law school. Karnow remembers sitting next to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at a dinner.

"She turned to me and said, `Tony Lewis is my hero,"' Karnow recalls. Ginsburg took a class of Lewis' while at HLS.

After returning to the Times, Lewis was assigned to cover the Supreme Court, where his thoroughness and persistence paid off in another Pulitzer.

"Nobody does more homework," Greenhouse says. "He created the modern Supreme Court beat as an entity...He just owned the subject by knowing everything about the Court."

Lewis' experience proved invaluable in writing his classic book Gideon's Trumpet, a 1964 bestseller about the landmark Gideon v. Wainwright decision that established a constitutional right to legal counsel in criminal cases.

In 1969, Lewis began writing a Times column called "At Home Abroad" while working as the paper's London bureau chief. Upon returning to the U.S., the column was retitled "Abroad at Home." He has written it continuously for more than 25 years.

The column's title alludes to Lewis' impressive travel pedigree: Over the course of his career he has worked extensively in Europe, Russia, China, India, Africa, the Middle East and has reported from every U.S. state but Alaska.

His travels have left him pessimistic about the state of foreign affairs.

"The world is certainly coming closer together, but the ability of people to find reasons to hate each other has increased," Lewis says. "It's the most deplorable and unexpected phenomenon."

Of all the conflicts he has seen, Lewis remains most vehement about Vietnam. He says he is appalled by "the complete wrongness of what we did, the savagery and pointlessness of the American war effort."

Throughout the '60s and '70s, Lewis excoriated the war effort in columns and articles and was repeatedly the target of hate mail, he says.

His columns continue to be controversial. In recent months he has become a relentless critic of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr. Opponents have denounced his unwavering loyalty to President Clinton.

Lewis is married to Margaret H. Marshall, a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The couple divide their time between Cambridge and Martha's Vineyard.

"We're too busy," he says. "My wife has lots of legal dinners and I travel, so we don't spend as much time together as we'd like."

During his all-too-rare free time, Lewis treasures more relaxed past-times: raising vegetables on the Vineyard, listening to music and writing letters. He doesn't even own a computer, Greenhouse says.

"For all I know, he still uses a shaving brush," Karnow says.

However, that doesn't mean he's behind the times. "He's not old-fashioned. "He's slow to give up things that've worked well for him," Vorenberg explains.

After 50 years, peers regard Lewis as one who has created his own tradition in journalism, and a respected reporter who continues to advocate his politics forcefully but gracefully. His work, which spans law and politics, the nation and the world, shows no sign of losing its impact or its range.

"He's been a law professor and he's an expert on the First Amendment," Greenhouse says. "He's transcended the limits of journalism."