Lincoln Caplan is a longtime journalist and author about law and public affairs. He has covered the Supreme Court, the Justice Department, and other parts of the government, based in Washington, D.C., and the American legal profession in general, reporting in New York City and around the country. 

He is now a senior research scholar and an occasional visiting lecturer in law at Yale Law School, a lecturer in English at Yale University, and a writing tutor at Yale's Davenport College. He was a member of the editorial board of The New York Times, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and the editor and president of Legal Affairs magazine. He has also been a White House Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Visiting Fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center. He is a contributing editor of The American Scholar and of Harvard Magazine.