Journalists and Other Non-Fiction Writers

Carl Stern, Bill Kurtis, and Fred Graham are all law school grads who turned to journalism. Catherine Crier was a practicing attorney and judge before moving into television commentary.

Geraldo Rivera earned a law degree at Brooklyn Law School.

Philip Graham went to Harvard Law School and clerked for Felix Frankfurter before founding The Washington Post.

Gerald Posner, author of the best seller Case Closed (about the JFK assassination) graduated from the Hastings College of Law and worked at Cravath, Swaine and Moore before turning to investigative journalism.

Victor Zammit, a retired Australian lawyer, has taken up the cause of the afterlife, writing and speaking on the possibility of conversing with the dead.

Jeff Greenfield, a Yale Law School graduate and former speechwriter for Robert Kennedy, was an analyst for ABC News and CNN, and he was a political correspondent for CBS News.

Barbara Olson, a lawyer and commentator for CNN, and wife of Solicitor General Ted Olson, died tragically in the terrorist attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001; she used her cell phone to call her husband from the plane to tell him of the hijacking.

Jack Ford was a Court TV commentator and Chief Legal Correspondent for NBC News. He used his winnings from appearances on the game show Jeopardy! to pay for part of his law school education. And do you remember Christine Craft, the broadcast journalist fired for being, “too old, too unattractive and not deferential enough to men”? She earned a law degree from McGeorge School of Law in 1995 and continues to work as a journalist.

Bob Woodruff, the ABC news anchor badly wounded in Iraq, received a law degree from the University of Michigan.

Linda Holmes, who blogs at Monkey See, is a recovering lawyer.

Cynthia McFadden, formerly of ABC’s Primetime Live and “Nightline”, received her JD from Columbia Law in 1984. Erin Moriarty is a correspondant for CBS News and that network’s “60 Minutes.” She received her law degree from Ohio State in 1977. Her coverage of the Ryan Ferguson case helped get him a successful appeal.

The late Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of Prozac Nation (1994), and Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (1998), and other books, graduated from Yale Law School in 2007 and practiced for a time at Boies Schiller Flexner.